"The Film Industry Is A Hit-Driven Industry"

This statement can be proved by several different reasons. The first is that a director of a successful film will be associated with quality films and will go on to be involved with other hit films. For example, since James Cameron directed The Terminator in 1984, he has gone on to direct five other award-winning films, including Avatar and Titanic, the two highest grossing films of all time.

Another reason is that successful films often have a large profit. Part of this profit can then be put forward to fund another film. This means that the next film has a lot of funding behind it and can afford better actors, CGI and marketing. Films that are made by the same company as a previously successful film can also be marketed as “from the makers of …”. This links the film to a commercially successful film and the producers behind it will hope that the first films success will rub off onto the second film.

A third point proving the above statement as true is formulaic filming. Films that are commercially successful, such as Shaun Of The Dead, which was eventually succeeded by Hot Fuzz, a film with an almost identical cast and a plot with several similar scenes or plotlines. These films usually achieve similar success or, in the case of Hot Fuzz, make even more. One reason that these films continue to make money is that the similarity between the films will allow the viewer to feel more connected to the story. Also, the use of the same cast ties in with using the profits of a previous film and the same production team.

Films that recieve a lot of publicity, whether its good or bad, will often do well at the box office. For example, The Dark Knight began to be featured in a large number of news articles due to the untimely death of Heath Ledger. This sombre news may have been an influenicing factor in the film becoming the seventh highest-grossing of all time. Another factor that may have caused it, and others, to become hits is that it is a sequel. Sequels are almost always hyped more than their predecessor and also have the advantage of being seen because people liked the previous one. To show how well a sequel often does, just take a look at the All Time Worldwide Highest-Grossing Films List on the imdb website. It shows that 26 of the top 50 films are sequels and a further ten eventually spawned sequels of their own.

Of course, not all films that do well have had all of the factors previously considered. One of the main points of making a film is to allow the viewer to enjoy the directors work. Some films that only achieve minimal success in cinemas go on to become cult hits which sold a large number of DVDs and videos. While these films are largely ingnored by mainstream media, they are often revered by collectors and hailed by many film critics as the true greatest films of all time.