Practice Exam Question

‘Media production is dominated by global institutions, which sell their products and services to national audiences’ To what extent do you agree with this statement?

Two global institutions I will be looking at is the British Pinewood studios and Americas main institution. Both places have released top box office films. These include Britain’s Les Mis and Americas After earth. The British film industry was only responsible for 15% of the global box office meaning America would have easily topped this with a potential percentage of 85%. Britain however have started to improve with their box office ratings as in 2009 they were on just 6.8%. This meaning is has more than doubled. Does this mean British films are getting more even in quality when compared to America? When looking at the films responsible for this change, you can see why Britain is improving. Britain has managed to produce films such a; Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, The Kings Speech and also Skyfall. Skyfall is now known as the highest grossing film in UK box office history and managed to cover 587 UK screens. This overall got the British film industry £20,180,369 in profit.

The domination of media production could also be because of genre of films that has become more popular. A lot more action and horror films are now being produced so the industry is losing audiences of families. However British film, Despicable Me 2, was the most popular film last year. This film I feel would appeal to mostly families with young children and occasionally teenagers. Film reviewer, Charles Grant put the decrease in family films being made down to them being too expensive.

American film industries do have access to services to make their films such as IMAX cameras and CGI. However Britain does have some of the same kind of thing. The British film industry’s profit rating has recently gone up 7% however the American film industry are beating us Britain’s currently with a profit intake of 17%. This 10% difference could potentially be a big difference in what each country can afford to make and what quality it would be. There are only 26 IMAX cameras in the world and they cost half a million pound each. The American industry does have a benefit, for the person in charge of the renting and creation of the IMAX cameras is in fact American.

Overall I do agree with the statement to some extent because the main global institutions do dominate most media production which sells products and services. Britain I feel offer a more and better variety of studios and landscapes for filming. However America offer better services of cameras. This is sometimes why American films are recorded and produced in Britain studios and then the British claim them as their own. Paul Greengrass, an English film director described the British film industry as a success story and predicts it will continue to grow internationally. This is true when you look at the British box office percentages and how they are increasing. Then you compare them to how America is slowing evening out with us.  In the future I think that Britain will continue to rise in percentage and their use of CGI and IMAX cameras will increase. They use a lot of CGI in the film Gravity that was an award winning film and IMAX cameras were used in Thor: The Dark World and this film also made a lot of profit in the box office. This can only be a good thing for the British film industry. And Britain are slowly but surely catching up with the quality of the Americans…So yes, media production is dominated by global institutions.