"The day we start thinking about what the audience wants, we're going to make bad choices."

-- Andrew Stanton (Pixar)

Kinostat Mission Statement:

Selecting and preparing a script for production is an exceedingly difficult job. On the one hand, designing a script to appeal to a specific target demographic, "thinking about what the audience wants," almost invariably results in disappointment: great scripts are not slapped together piecemeal from the results of focus groups. On the other hand, only rarely is an original script also a great script, and even great scripts do not always make profitable films. Granted this, what is a production executive to do?

If all your studio produces are films whose appeal ignores almost every demographic boundary, and you know why this is so, then your problem is solved, and you probably work at Pixar. However, almost every great film has demographic limits, and if these limits are too narrow, the film will not turn a profit. The goal of Kinostat is to help your studio to identify great scripts with sufficient demographic breadth to make profitable films.

How Kinostat Can Help You:

On account of the immense cost, producing a film is an extremely risky way to determine whether it possesses such demographic breadth. Therefore, studios often attempt to remove this risk by compelling their writers to think about what the audience wants to see. This is akin to an architectural firm that plans to design a skyscraper, and then, after removing all risks of catastrophe, finds itself with the blueprints for a hole in the ground. Generally, the most one can expect from this practice is to raise a terrible script to the heights of mediocrity.

Kinostat solves this problem by helping you to separate the process of script creation from the process of script selection. We do this by providing a far more economical way to assess a script's demographic breadth than actually producing and releasing the film.

Using Kinostat, your studio and its writers simply focus on creating original scripts, however far they may stray from formula or genre convention. When it comes time to select a script for production, you show us plans for however many skyscrapers you have designed, and, based on a revolutionary system of demographic analysis, which employs a pool of over 10,000 people to profile the consumer market for each potential film project, we will tell you which among these designs are most likely to produce a rock-solid structure.

As a result, Kinostat helps you avoid investing massive amounts of capital in the production and marketing of projects that were doomed on the drawing board, and also helps you avoid building holes in the ground.

How Kinostat Works: An Example

As an example, let's say your company is considering producing a drama for a mid-December opening. Assuming your readers like the script, you still need to know whether the target demographic will actually pay to see the film in theaters. The problem is that the film has not yet been produced, and therefore cannot be screened to assess the reaction of this demographic. This dramatically increases the risk of every film project your company pursues that is not a sequel to a previous project with proven demographic relevance.

To reduce your risk, Kinostat has assembled a group of more than 10,000 individuals over a comprehensive range of demographics, across the United States. Each of these individuals has provided to Kinostat extensive quantitative feedback on a wide variety of films that have opened in theaters over the past two years. From this data, we can instantly identify that subset of the total group whose feedback has served as the most reliable predictor of box-office gross for films targeted at any given demographic you might wish to consult.

The people in this subset possess a keen understanding of what drives box-office success for their demographic, and this has enabled them to estimate the U.S. box-office success of 20 or more films targeting this demographic with exceptional accuracy and consistency, based simply upon the fact that these people's taste happens to mirror that of the demographic as a whole. Their results for this demographic are the best provided by our 10,000+ pool, and their assessment of your film's prospects will therefore be exponentially more accurate than that of the average respondent to an online survey or street poll.

In the present example, this subset would include people likely to see your drama opening in mid-December. Our rigorously selected and exactingly customized demographic sample will then review your film's script and/or synopsis, along with any cast information, and provides rigorous quantitative feedback that mirrors the perceptions of the entire target demographic for the film you plan to produce.

How to Get Started

To use Kinostat to obtain a demographic assessment of your film project, you first provide us with the relevant script and/or synopsis, and cast information if available, as well as a prospective date for U.S. release. Using this information, we identify that subset of individuals in our database that most accurately reflects the appropriate demographic range for your film.

This demographic subset will then immediately analyze the material you have provided, and return a quantitative assessment of how the target market is likely to react to the film concept. Further, each analyst will provide a detailed written analysis to complement the provided assessment, and will propose changes in cast and plot that the analyst believes may make the film more attractive to the target market.

What You Get From Us

You receive from Kinostat all the raw analyst evaluations and estimates for your film project, along with a summary of this information that includes straightforward visual representations of the estimate U.S. box-office gross spread, and a comprehensive overview identifying key trends in the analysis. This information alone is not intended to be sufficient to tell you whether to produce the film, but will provide you with a reasonable estimate of the range of possible U.S. box office grosses for the film prior to taking into account the remaining uncertainties involved in the production process.

A good way to think about it is to consider that what you get from us is the information you need to screen out projects that, for all their merits, are unlikely to be well received by the target demographic, no matter how well the associated film is produced. The demographic data we can provide, and available nowhere else, is thus intended to assist you in making the final call, in conjunction with the film's budget, its competition, and the attractiveness of competing projects.

Frequently Asked Questions

I already pay interns, readers, and development staff to tell me if a script is good. Why do I need demographic data?

Demographic data is important on account of the fact that a good script, even when well produced, does not necessarily result in a profitable film.

While your staff can tell you if a script is any good, the audience is itself the deciding factor in your film's success. Therefore it is vital that you assess the target market's likely reaction to a film produced from your script. Though the work of development staff is undoubtedly vital, this absolutely crucial information is not something that they can provide.

Does Kinostat include DVD, ancillary sales, or foreign box-office gross assessments?

We do not incorporate DVD sales etc. into estimates because DVD sales occur over a relatively long period. The reason this is a problem is the fact that we need about 20 estimates before we have absolute confidence in analyst's ranking. Thus if we wait for DVD results, it could be years before any given analyst amasses sufficient results for a statistically relevant ranking. Thus we focus on US box-office gross and allow the studio to extrapolate total revenue from that.

Studio executives make production decisions based on the same criteria that your analysts do (theme, plot, subject matter, and cast), but they know far more about making films. How does using analysts provide additional insight into the process of selecting scripts for production?

Demographic analysis represents a powerful way to reduce risk, simply because studio executives are rarely representative of the target demographic for the films they consider producing.

The best way to find out if males under 25 will see Film Z is to ask a statistically relevant sample of males under 25 whether they would see Film Z. The people in this group may not know much about film production. They do however know whether they are likely go to the theater and pay to see Film Z, and that is a likelihood that a studio executive can only estimate roughly.

Kinostat can help the executive by identifying a manageably small number of people whose tastes consistently and accurately mirror the tastes of the entire target market for any given film project. By scouring the country for the most accurate representatives of each target demographic, and rigorously testing this accuracy over the course of years, we can provide this crucial missing data, enabling the studio executive to make a decision based the best information available.

You can think of Kinostat as similar to a GPS system: we give the studio executive a clear understanding of the demographic landscape relevant to prospective film projects, so that the executive can focus on doing the actual "driving" required to choose a project and make it successful.

How much does a film assessment cost?

The cost of a film assessment depends on the target demographic, the type of film (mainstream or independent), the volume of information available for the assessment, and the level of detail required for the assessment. We can work with the studio to assemble a demographic team capable of providing an assessment that is cost-effective for virtually any size and type of project.

Whom do I contact if I have a question that is not answered above?

Please send further questions to the site administrator at this address.