Film (Media Industries)

Production:
the action of making or manufacturing from components or raw materials, or the process of being so manufactured.


Distribution: 

the action of sharing something out among a number of recipients.

Exchange:

an act of giving one thing and receiving another (especially of the same kind) in return.

The Jungle Book (1967) is comparable to The Jungle Book (2016). According to the OCR specification: The Jungle Book (2016) has taken over 1 billion US dollars already at the cinema box office alone (and will generate more income as a DVD/Blu-ray disc and online). The film has a clear pattern of production, distribution and circulation that can be easily distinguished and is a film production from a major studio.

The Jungle Book (1967) is a historically significant media product and film text. The 1967 film is currently one of the most successful films of all time (it has taken over 100 billion US dollars) and followed a traditional pattern of production, distribution and circulation, although it enjoyed a ‘second life’ on video and DVD.

The Jungle Book (1967) is over 50 years old.

 It is a very successful film and to date has grossed over $100 billion.

The Jungle Book was made by Disney Studios under the production company of Walt Disney Productions, a famous film studio in Hollywood that specialises in animated cartoons.

The film is often described as an animated musical comedy.

Other Disney texts from the same director, Wolfgang Reitherman, include One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961) and The Sword in the Stone (1963).

The production of The Jungle Book (1967) involved a specialised and institutionalised method of media production, which for Disney is animation and is still crucial to the studio’s brand identity to this day.

The Jungle Book (1967) was produced by Walt Disney Studios and cost $4 million to make.

Walt Disney Studios is an American film studio based in Hollywood; between 1937 and 2016 it produced 56 animation films.

During this long history, Walt Disney Studios has been considered the best animation company in film production, and as recently as 2007 Walt Disney Animation Studios purchased Pixar Animation Studios.

This is a typical characteristic of a media conglomerate that has enough money and power to take over its competitors.

The Jungle Book (1967) is a prime example of such high-cost and top-quality animation

Media conglomerate:A media group or media institution that owns numerous companies involved in mass media enterprises, such as television, radio, publishing, motion pictures, theme parks or the internet. Conglomerates are usually global in size and reach

Historical context

1967 film is important to Disney Studios’ history – it is a magical landmark film that is among the best ever written for Disney and includes the Oscar-nominated songs ‘The Bare Necessities’ and ‘I Wanna Be Like You’.

The original soundtrack for The Jungle Book was also the first to achieve gold disc status in the USA for an animated feature film.

The Jungle Book (1967) itself is premised on an imaginative interpretation of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, and the film credits a notable cast and production team that had been in place and had worked together in the studio – at this time still a family-run business – for a number of years.

The racialized representations of the 1967 film were not repeated in the 2016 version and perhaps reflect the institutionalised racism of America at the time where races were segregated 

Economic contexts

By the time The Jungle Book was released Disney was already a successful film company, and the Disney Corporation was diversifying into theme parks (Disneyland), television series and merchandising deals.  These were set up through its distribution arm, Buena Vista, in 1953. In part this was Disney’s reaction to the baby boom of the 1950s, and the expansion of its business interests in home entertainment focused on its television series.

The Jungle Book was released in October 1967 and grossed nearly $24 million on its first worldwide release.

The film was produced on a budget of $4 million and was the fourth highest grossing movie in 1967.

The Jungle Book was re-released in cinemas in the USA in 1978, 1984 and 1990.

It enjoyed European screenings throughout the 1980s, with a particularly strong German market.

The film has been released on a number of occasions to home entertainment markets.

Disney gains longevity of sales. Each time it translates an animation classic via the latest media technology to make it available in a new format, the company captures the next generation who then commit to the brand loyalty.

Most recently, The Jungle Book (1967) has been released as a digital download via iTunes and is available on streaming services such as Amazon Video and Google Play – demonstrating the ‘legs’ of a movie made over 50 years ago and the success of Disney as a media institution in reselling the brand over and over again to different generations.

The total gross for the movie is $141 million in the USA and $205 million worldwide.

Ownership, distribution and control Making money out of producing films to be shown at the cinema is very difficult. This is because there are so many other media platforms the film can be sold by, for example, through merchandising.

The success of the film exemplifies how Hollywood conquers not only the home market, but also the global market. This is typical of the Disney brand and the quality of films that the company makes. The film also offers an example of media translation as it has benefited from evolving digital technologies and developments in home entertainment. The following timeline of its re-releases illustrates how historically Disney has embraced technological change to ‘exploit’ its product:

The Jungle Book was released in the United States in 1967.
In 1991, it was released as part of the Walt Disney Classics collection – illustrating how a media institution benefits from a back catalogue of movies that can be resold to younger generations. Three years later the home video sales totalled 14.8 million copies. The aim was to price the Disney Classics movies so that every family could afford to buy a copy.
A limited issue DVD was released in 1999 by Buena Vista Home Entertainment and there was a subsequent release as a two-disc DVD in 2007, marketed as a platinum edition to celebrate the film’s 40th anniversary.
In 2010 the film was released as a Blu-ray/DVD/digital copy combo-pack.

Disney used the MPC (moving picture comapany) to produce the 2016 jungle book

ALICE stands for Artificial Life Crowd Engine. Our in-house crowd software was created originally for Troy in 2004. ALICE enables artists to manage crowd behaviour, motion clip editing and blending, and customised scripting for large groups of agents, and is one of MPC’s flagship software products.
Using ALICE, the Crowd team can tackle everything from a couple of agents to several hundred thousand. Crowd will use a mix of motion capture data and animation clips to inject life into a given scene and have previously used the software to to simulate huge armies, flocks of birds, herds of mammoths, swarms of insects, zombie hordes, space battles and many other types of scenarios.

Furtility is MPC’s technology for creating photorealistic hair, fur, feathers, vegetation, and other fibres like clothing and ropes. The first version was written in 2005 for 10,000 BC and was fully re-written for The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian in 2006. It has since been used on most of our film and advertising work, and remains one of our key technologies for creating our visual effects.
The Furtility engine itself is solely built on proprietary or open source technologies and then exposed via interfaces for the main 3D packages we are using: Maya and RenderMan. We also have the ability to render high quality previews using our in-house OpenGL renderer: MugginsGL.

 Genesis is our Virtual Production platform. Virtual production enables filmmakers to make better creative choices much earlier in the production process, leading to better quality outcomes. Genesis is a multi-year development project that has been used on some of the biggest movies of the past few years.

 Kali is MPC’s finite element destruction toolset, originally developed for Sucker Punch in 2011. Named after the Hindu god of destruction, it has quickly become one of our primary tools for film FX work. Based on the DMM engine from Pixelux, Kali continues to find new uses in our FX toolset.

Tessa gives productions a pipeline that can track, automate, and organize movement of digital assets between artists. The artist is insulated from the complexity of the underlying data and processes – allowing them to focus on their creative tasks rather than worrying about where something is.

There are Six Disneylands—that is, “castle parks”—around the world—in California, Florida, Paris, Tokyo, Shanghai, and Hong Kong

a new jungle cruise film is being released summer 2020, and a second live action jungle book at come point this year too.

After three years in the making from concept to product, The Jungle Book (2016) was released from April to July 2016 across 70 different national territories.

The highly competitive business of launching and sustaining a film to the largest appropriate audience was timed by Disney for a summer film release, traditionally seen as coinciding with events for school-age children and family time.


The Jungle Book was released in North America in Disney Digital 3-D.

The film was also released in RealD 3D, IMAX and IMAX 3D, with a worldwide opening figure for IMAX of $20.4 million from 901 IMAX screens, remarkable for a PG-rated film, the film grossed a total of $39 million in IMAX screenings worldwide. The film became a critical and commercial success, grossing over $966 million,

Marketing is a part of distribution, Disney used he following strategy to market the JB.

Different elements of film marketing that attract audience attention for the film include:

 word of mouth – social recommendation is the most effective trigger for cinema attendance and can give a film ‘legs’, so interest remains high for weeks after release

posters – choosing and using an image to distil the essence of a film

trailers – the most cost-effective form of promotion, normally shown prior to another film with a similar target audience

social media messages – for example The Jungle Book 2016 Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts.

•As a product of this global brand it succeeded in attracting a wide range of age groups, not just the under-16s or its traditional family audience, to see the film. Disney’s achievement in re-making a Disney classic is phenomenal, in part due to the technology involved and the reinterpretation of the characters and the narrative, but also to the ability of the conglomerate to market and distribute the product and to value its audience.

•The film enjoyed unrivalled success in its marketing and distribution to India, China and Europe and other overseas markets – a characteristic of Disney Studios.

• In addition the film was made appealing to action-adventure fans and animation and special effects viewers. These are identifiable as middle-aged and male movie-goers – not typically associated with The Jungle Book ’s audience.
This is reflected in the global box office returns for the film, over $966 million, and in the critical acclaim it received – winning the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects.

•The casting of an Indian actor as the main protagonist and international actors would have helped develop global sales.

Explain how films can be marketed to become global brands. Refer to the Jungle Book films in your answer

In modern society, the most successful way for a film to be globally recognised is through social media due to the potential billions of people that could see it. An example of how the 2016 rendition of The Jungle Book has done this is the verified Instagram account that they created back in 2016 to get people excited for the new film and release teasers to further encourage this behaviour from recipients. The account gained 61.2k followers and in the bio they have included a link to purchase the film on DVD, encouraging sales through social media. Another way that Disney specifically advertise their films is by constructing rides in their global parks, which therefore targets every park and gains a wider audience. They did not do this for the Jungle Book but instead opened a show in Animal Kingdom called The Jungle Book: Alive With Magic in May of 2016, which was opened a month after the film was released and therefore can be identified as intentional to promote the film, with the audience capacity at a very high 5000 per show, thousands of people that had travelled to the Orlando park from all over the world for a holiday will be influenced by the performance to watch the film upon its arrival to cinemas later that year. As well as this, celebrity endorsements are a key selling point for films trying to gain global attention, and the Jungle Book followed this well, with celebrities like Scarlet Johansson and Christopher Walken starring as voice actors and posing for posters that were scattered across the globe so people would see their favourite celebrities next to the characters they play, and therefore entice a viewer to go to the cinema and pay to see hear them. A lot of merchandise was released following the film’s opening day, which included everything from action figures, bags and art pieces to stuffed animals to appeal to young children due to their cute appearance. This is a common occurrence in films, and almost every globally recognised film has a plush that can be purchased, even films like the Avengers which doesn't have any animals but they still create plush characters because the marketing directors understand that children are attracted to soft merchandise that they can play with, and will subsequently beg their parents for. In order for a film brand to obtain a global status, they must appeal to as wide of an audience as possible, which can be made or broken by reviews; if someone is unsure whether or not to see a film, they often to on the internet to check reviews, and if those are mostly negative they subsequently won't go. To assist in more positive feedback, Disney invited 400 people that read the Disney Blog to a private screening of the film, at which they were surprised by an appearance from the director Jon Favreau, who is a well-respected man and therefore everyone in attendance will feel obligated to have positive feedback due to the pleasant surprise; therefore returning to their blogs to leave positive comments which could potentially reassure someone that seeing the film is worth it. Disney used these bloggers to spread the message that the film was not just for children, which was an assumption due to the talking animals, and therefore he held private screenings full of adults to spread the message that Mr. Favreau used sophisticated filmmaking techniques to create the animal characters. Films are marketed to become global brands by having a large company producing them, for example, Marvel has become such a loved and well known company, that no matter what they create, it will be talked about and watched worldwide due to how credible Marvel are. The Jungle Book follows this too, due to DIsney being such a popular company, no matter what they create, they will have millions of people globally paying to see it.


Discuss the advances in technology within the film industry referring to the JB 1967 and 2016 in your answer. Explain how these advances are useful in attracting a wider audience

Back when the original 1967 Jungle Book was being made, technology was not very advanced, and therefore Disney's way of creating the animation was still cel-animation, which was less expensive to create with the film costing a total $4 million. The film was eventually released 10 months after the death of Walt Disney which although a terrible loss, did encourage people to see the film that he worked on while alive. Without social media to promote the film, Disney were reliant on physical promotion such as posters to help gain attention, and ended up earning a total of just under 23 million dollars, from DVD sales and an additional $141 million at the box office, which considering the production costs, was an excellent profit. Disney were also very good at getting companies to promote their films so that more people would be aware of it despite the lack of internet; an example of this is during the 90s when they were releasing the DVD for the Jungle Book 2 and Disney approached McDonalds who put the film on their happy meals to gain attention of people buying them, which was a large amount due to McDonalds worldwide popularity. The main way that the original Jungle Book was promoted was through posters at cinemas, which although it would not be effective in the modern day, there were not many family films being made during the 60s and therefore families were the main audience which generated a large profit. Looking at the technological advances that were brought to the recent 2016 Jungle Book film, Disney brought the classic story to life through the live action and CGI elements, teaming up with the MPC to make the animals and jungle look as realistic as possible to impress viewers. This film varies from the 1967 one mainly due to the more gritty feeling, with director Jon Favreau's main message that he wanted to convey being that this was not the same as the original film, and instead was more sophisticated and can therefore be enjoyed by more than just children and their families. The main way that the marketing team helped show that this film wasn't just for children was through technology, with IMAX clips online, a VR tour and a 360 degree Facebook video, which young children wouldn't be aware of. As well as this, the director hired out a large theatre and brought thousands of adult bloggers to give feedback on the private screening, which shows that they are trying to target the film to a wider audience. Social media also played a large part in the attracting worldwide viewers, with Facebook, Twitter and Instagram all making accounts to promote the film which were given lots of attention and 100s of thousands of followers. The budget for the 2016 rendition was an enormous $175 million, which went mainly towards the CGI elements which include the Artificial Life Crowd Engine, Furtility and Genesis. Furtility was a key selling point due to its ability of creating realistic fur for the animals in the films, which was done to shock and leave an audience in anticipation for how well done the final film would be, with several trailers showing off how realistic the animals look due to the Furtility being used by the Moving Picture Company. Due to the major difference in production for the 2 films, with the original 1967 Jungle Book being made with traditional cel animation and on a low budget whereas the 2016 was made on a high budget CGI production, the new one was destined to do better in terms of profit. However, the storylines differ and judging by the IMDb scores, the original low budget film was preferred due to its light-hearted storyline for families, which demonstrates that even with high budget CGI, without a solid storyline it wasn't a better film (the scores differ by 0.1 but due to the high production value of the recent film, it was presumably have a better IMDb score). A wider audience was achieved by the 2016 film, but this was due to the heavy social media efforts being made and promotions at worldwide Disney parks, which wasn't being done in the 60s, the newer Jungle Book also proved to be more appropriate for adults, who could have potentially grown up with the original Jungle Book and then brought their children to see the new one.