Researching the Audiences of Thrillers

The audience of any film is perhaps the most important aspect that will constitute the film's success (Like 'Avatar' (James Cameron, 2009)) or its failure (Treasure Planet (Ron Clements, John Musker, 2002). If I want to create a successful thriller I need to know what sort of audience I need to pitch my film at. However, I do also need to think about whether to create a niche product for an age group that is not the main audience for thriller or a product that is aimed directly at the age groups where thriller is most popular.

Thriller Movie Age Profile

Base: National Metro
Source: Roy Morgan 2009
(Source)

This graph compares the age groups of thriller audiences to the general population of Australia (I assume it is Australia as the website itself is Australian). While this may not be representative of the whole world, it is at least a rough image of such audiences. I will also admit that this is not a good graph. A good graph can be understood at a glance and this takes a lot longer to understand than one glance, however, it does illustrate a decent point. On the right is the population make up of Australia and on the left is the make up of thriller audiences. Overall, the age spread for thrillers seems to be rather equal between the ages of 18 to 50. This suggests that thrillers are popular across all age ranges but with the majority being from the three middle age groups. Interestingly, the 14-17 year old age category makes up a very small amount of the thriller audience. This could be solely down to the small percentage of them in the general population.

From this, I can safely assume that I need to try and make my thriller accessible to all age groups as it appears to be popular across all age groups. This would make perfect business sense anyway, as it would maximise the profit if the film was to be feature length and be shown in cinemas. My analysis of the graph could be wrong, however, as it is very difficult to understand and I wish that there were more useful statistics out there. Unfortunately there is not, so I will have to make do with assumptions that make sense overall even if they are not fully correct.


Thriller Movie Gender Profile
Base: National Metro
Source: Roy Morgan 2009
(Source)

This pie chart shows the gender profile of thriller movies and this is so much easier to understand than the previous graph. Overall, audiences are roughly made up of an equal proportion of males and females with a slightly male skew. This could be down to the increase in action films being classified as thrillers (Like Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (Michael Bay, 2009), Spider-Man 3 (Sam Raimi, 2007) and TRON: Legacy (Joseph Kosinski, 2010)) which naturally have a higher number of males attending. This has apparently changed over time with the source website stating "have a slight female skew." This shows that the website clearly has not updated itself correctly, but also demonstrates that thrillers used to have a slight female skew. This minor change towards the male audience members is probably due to the afforementioned reason.

The roughly equal spread of the genders was at first surprising to me, as thriller is something you would expect a male to go and see due to the stereotype of men needing to prove how tough they are. However, this viewpoint is incredibly stereotypical and most film genres these days have an approximately equal profile because most films try to attract as broad an audience as they can.

Conclusion
From this research, I can gather that I need to try and make my thriller opening accessible to all ages and all genders as it is a genre that is loved by all and I would not like to discourage members of an audience from seeing my film or other films in that genre.