This is 40, Director: Judd Apatow, 2012
Production Companies: Apatow Productions
Distributer: Universal Pictures
Budget $35m
The Official website offers a fairly limited number of interactive features:
Universal hopes you will share the trailer via social networking with other potential audiences, which will save them a lot of time and money in trying to reach them themselves.
In the ‘About’ section the top of the page tells us 64, 180 people ‘like’ this on Facebook, and includes a button for you to ‘like’ it too.
The IMDB page for This is 40 gives it a user rating of 6.3 from 28,082 users, clicking into this number gives a demographic breakdown of those users. There are also 144 user reviews – many of which are quite negative... the first one begins “This movie was actually painful to watch...”
In the 'download' section one of the things on offer is a 'Twitter skin'... a theme you can use as part of your Twitter identity... Universal is really trying to place the film into the sphere of the social networking.
A few simple conclusions we can draw from this case study:
Web 2.0 is a phenomenon which is utilised by both institutions and audiences.
Institutions take advantage largely user-generated websites such Youtube and Facebook in an attempt to widen their audience share for their products.
Audiences also use these sites to share their views on those products. While 64,000 Facebook users clicked a button to indicate they ‘liked’ the film - or at least the trailer, 28,000 IMDB users generated a decidedly average user rating of 6.3/10. All their demographic data are shared.
This raises the issue that web 2.0 has had a ‘democratising’ effect on the media... this a change from a time when only critics’ opinions were published and available to audiences.
Who benefits most?... (that’s for you to answer)
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