Commercial Success

Comercial Success

Both 38. The Girl on the Train, and 40. 10 Cloverfield Lane fall under the Psychological Thriller genre. Although most of the top grossing films of 2016 were of the Adventure, Action or Comedy Genre, these films still had a lot of success - their 2016 total gross both being over 70 million dollars.
With both of these films appearing in the top 40, shows that this type of film (with the storylines and conventions of psychological thrillers) have been both popular and successful in 2016.

On a bigger time scale, from 1995-2017, there is surprising many films in the top 25 movies that fall under the psychological thriller genre. Arguably within this list there are at least 5 films that would be considered a psychological thriller, however some of the films have more prominent conventions of more popular genres. For example the movie 'The Sixth Sense' , that impressively holds the 2nd spot, is a psychological thriller but is more known as a horror film, as its conventions fit also with this genre (e.g. ghost-story).

Target Audience Research

By using both BFI Exit Polls and the website 'YouGov' we are researching our target audience. We will look at the audience of films that we think are similar to our film (due to its genre, characters and storyline) and from that we will find out who's attention we should be aiming our film at.

BFI Exit Polls

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest.

Similar to our film, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest is a Crime Thriller with aspects of the Psychological Thriller Genre. It contains a female protagonist which could be the reason that there were slightly more Women who were surveyed than men. In terms of Target audience for our film, this could suggest that we also will have a mainly female target audience. The age of the people surveyed are mostly Over 35, with the 'Under 35' category being only 33%. Initially we thought for our film the Target audience would be early 20s however this has shown that it would be the incorrect decision to aim our film at this age group - as it seems to be slightly older people who are most involved in the viewing of Psychological Thrillers.

YouGov

Gone Girl

The website YouGov gives you an average profile of the people who like and have watched Gone Girl. In this case, it is a 25-39 year old female or a high social grade. This female is left wing in terms of politics.

Momento

For the film, Momento, it mainly has a Male audience, but still with the age of 25-39. Again they are left wing, but more so than the audience of Gone Girl.

Donnie Darko

The audience of Donnie Darko has a very similar audience to that of Momento, we can guess this is due to the similaritly of male protagonists.

Looking at all of the profiles we have researched, we have come to the conclusion that most of the audience of psychological thrillers are of the age of 25-39. They are all also Left Wing and of a relatively high social class and wealth. Another similarity that we noticed is that many of their professions are revolved around entertainment and media.