Distribution Plan

The Distributor consists of being a partner in the project, contributing to the films development/production costs and later on bringing the film to the market. Individual distributors may release from 1 or two films a week, or as much as 25-30 a year.
Every film has its own tailor made distribution plan in which the producer and distributor work closely together. The most important decisions are when the distributor is to decide when the film should be released, and how to release the film in order to optimise its chances. Therefore the distributor would have to gather a combination of market knowledge, have commercial experience, do statistical research, and use professional judgement to determine the audience for each film.
The distributor should also have considered what the film may earn, as therefore if they feel they will earn a high amount they can use more money to market the film without loosing valuable money as the extra audience they have attracted would make up for the money they have spent on launching the film.
The distributors challenge is always to attract as wide a spread as possible- identifying niche interest groups as well as the broad mainstream, and ideally helping a film to 'break out' and 'cross over'. Yet the distributor should never loose sight of their core target audience in which they have to consider; age group, gender, lifestyles, and social networks and media consumption patterns.
The most frequent cinemagoers tend to be teenagers, students, young adults in which more than half of these 15-24 year olds visit the cinema in the UK once a month. Therefore the distributor would have to find when in which they can release their film in order to catch their target audience. This can vary quite a bit as to looking at what other films are to be released that will also attract a similar audience, as there is allot of competition in which you have to create your target audience to watch your film instead of theirs. The Competition is very large in public holidays as this is when the majority of films are released, as therefore a wider audience will visit the cinema.