Successful Film In Recent Years

I decided to look at trends of successful film in the past few years to see what types and genres of film have been the most successful. This will allow me to get an idea of what kind of elements, genres and ideas are popular among different target audiences.

The first show i will be looking at is HBO's Game of Thrones which began broadcasting in 2011 and has become massive with the last episode of it's fourth season receiving over 7 million viewers in the states alone.

The show has a more mature audience mainly aimed at 17+ because of the more complicated plot line, gore and sexual scenes. I believe it does a good job of appealing to it's target audience in a few ways. One way it does this is by having no main character and developing a whole set of characters and sharing their ideologies with you. By doing this you can understand and connect with all the characters even though they may be enemies and having characters you feel for is key to bringing in an audience. The way they do this also results in you finding characters that you connect with more than other ones, this method of making the audience have favorite characters actually works very well as a device to keep a big audience as people feel more inclined to watch as they will want to find out what happens to their favorite characters. They also appeal to their target audience well by respecting their maturity and creating a universe in which anyone can die and they often kill off main characters. This brings a sense of tension that the series is famous for as you never know if you're favorite character is going to die. I like this technique and think that putting these characters in situations where the audience feels a sense of danger can be very effective and one of the reasons the show is so popular is most likely it's ability to invoke these emotions in their audience. The creators definitely did this purposefully.

Now i will look at AMC's Breaking Bad. With it's first TV broadcast in 2008 and it's last in 2013 Breaking Bad was incredibly popular during it's run on television with it's final episode having 10.28 million viewers.  

Breaking Bad follows many darker yet very interesting and different themes throughout it's various seasons. I believe this is one of the reasons it may have been so successful because the focuses of this show address and look at many things in society in a very original way. For example the main character being told they are suffering from a very serious cancer almost straight away tells us their fate but the character reacts in a completely original way as to what we would normally expect people to react like which intrigues the audience and makes them want to continue watching. Breaking Bad often uses this technique of foreshadowing events that happen towards the end of a season and then using the season itself to build up to what was hinted at/shown at the start. This is very effective as the creators used this technique on purpose to draw peoples interest in the events leading up to something and then give them a very excited feeling when they see the events they now understand unfold.