Distribution
Disney is the world’s 2nd largest conglomerate (a combination of two or more corporations) following Comcast who are Disney’s biggest competition at the moment. The company control film makers such as marvel, Pixar, and Walt Disney productions. Distribution is very important part of modern day media as it will have a huge factor on what type of audience and how many people will be available to watch it, for example Disney sell licenses on Netflix and sky. This helps distribute the film around and make everything easy to watch. Distribution is changing the world because people are more likely to go online and watch a film instead of buy it because there are so many options on how to watch it. It’s very important because without it your film wouldn’t sell. As media has changed over the years, distribution has gotten easier, for example we have social media which is a popular choice for adverts and advertising upcoming films. They wouldn’t have had this luxury in the 20th century which would make it harder to distribute. McDonalds was one of Disney’s sponsors. Disney collaborated with McDonalds and so Disney themed toys were put into happy meals in conjunction to the latest film release from Disney. This advertised Disney’s latest films and encouraged children to want to go and see the film that is coming out. McDonald’s would also benefit as some children will encourage their parents to buy a happy meal purely for the toy inside. Disney distributed their films through posters and billboards, a lot of posters would have been sent around the country to attract everyone. Also they would have shown Disney films in cinemas across the Country as it would have not been on DVD or the internet yet. The new releases of old films bring and invites new audiences together. The film is now the 39th to reach the $900 million milestone. “The Jungle Book” blew past forecasts in its opening weekend, grossing $103.6 million in the U.S. during April 15-17. Advantages of these are that it means it targets a wider audience.
Conclusion
To conclude it is important to stress the importance of distribution to a conglomerate like Disney. Without effective distribution patterns films could easily underachieve profit wise for example but it must be remembered that distribution cannot be seen in isolation because it can quite easily be linked to the principle of synergy, as one business theorist states ‘industries rely on repetition through use of stars, genres, franchises, repeatable narratives and so on to sell formats to audiences, then industries try to impose scarcity to keep demand high.’ This is very true of Disney who with the original Jungle Book 1967 found himself with limited avenues of distribution – namely TV and film, thus to keep The Jungle Book characters fresh in the minds of audiences the company created other programmes and ancillary products from 1967 to the early 2000’s to keep alive the idea of the characters so that in the future there could be a potential remake or reboot of the original film, these other programmes included Talespin, a cartoon starring many of the characters from the original film and Jungle Cubs – another cartoon which explored Baloo, Shere Khan and other characters’ lives as children, the aim of these products were to not only to keep audiences entertained but to keep the Jungle Book franchise fresh and active although more importantly , a means by which one media product can promote another media product by the same company, a term called synergy `and one which will only improve with the creation of Disney’s new streaming service in 2019
Marketing/Circulation
Disney is a conglomerate and one of the largest. A conglomerate is a mixture of two or corporations which come under one main firm. Disneys conglomerate consists of : Disney, ABC, ESPN, Lucas film, marvel. Disney is part of the BIG 6. The Big 6 are an oligopoly. They are the 6 main companies that produce media.
Jon Favreau introduced the film via social media and also introduced it by promoting it at Disney’s Animal Kingdom. They also released three teaser trailers in the lead up to the releasing of the film in cinemas. Disney have steered away from using animation and into more real life films so older audiences would be more interested as they may find animations childish. For example, Disney has done this with Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast. Also with films like Pirates and the Caribbean use more violent themes to attract older audiences.Disney circulated photographs of paired actors with their onscreen characters, ESPN, Snapchat to create a living poster, Kenzo.
The differences with the length of the trailer are that the new one is longer as it has to fill the advert space on tv. Then the atmosphere is strangly different with mood a lot tenser and every thing more viscous and wanting to attract more varied audience. Back in 1967, the ‘old’ jungle book used famous jazz singers to promote the film. This was because the Jazz singers produced the soundtrack in Jungle Book. However, for the new Jungle Book, they used actors to promote because if people saw a famous actor they liked in the trailer, they would most likely go and see the film. Comparing the posters between the two productions of the jungle book you can see better technology to create the posters, making them more realistic and emotive. Also, there are a range of posters created in 2016, where as in 1967 there was only 1 poster of poor quality. The new posters show all the different characters, however, if you put them together in the correct order they all fit together to make one larger poster.In the 1967 film, Walt Disney wanted swinging sixties bands such as the Beatles to play the characters of the vultures which is who they based the characters off of for the 1967 jungle book film. Disney Vault. The "Disney Vault" is the term used by Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment for its policy of putting many of its most popular home video releases of Walt Disney Animation Studios's animated features on moratorium.The re-release of the Jungle book in 2016 after the 2 previous release help to create the extreme success that has been surrounded the film as Disney itself. The film was also released onto VHS to appeal to the older audience.
Conclusion
To conclude, marketing has obviously changed. You could argue that with its licensing deals with Kenzo and its focus on aggressively targeting a secondary audience to build profits on the back of a family audience who always turn out for Disney films you could argue that Disney have grown smarter and more precise with their planning, however we must also not forget that there are still lots of similarities between the two eras, for example the use of stars and red carpet premieres to promote a film remains in place as does the creation of character posters and trailers as the fundamental basics of Disney marketing so to me what is forgotten is that Disney as a conglomerate have always been a master at marketing, it is why they are the number one entertainment conglomerate in the world and yes some of the practices have changed but the whole reason why there was new version of The Jungle Book in the first place was because of the success of the first film, a success driven by an effective marketing campaign.
