Jungle Book Marketing

Essay on Marketing/Circulation (distribution and exhibition)

Explain the marketing and circulation process on the film industry in relation to The Jungle Book 1967 and 2016. In your answer you must also: explain how historical, cultural and economic contexts influence the production, distribution and circulation of films.

A conglomerate is the combination of two or more corporations operating in entirely different industries under one corporate group, usually involving a parent company and many subsidiaries. Being a conglomerate, this allowed The Jungle Book (1967) to increase the amount of hype around the film as it was said to be Walt Disney’s most entertaining triumph in the world of animation, due to a new technology called technicolour. Technicolour played a major role in the early days of Disney as it was an art no one has ever seen before. Cel animation also played a huge role in the production of 1967 Jungle Book

The jungle Book 2016 marketed the film in a lot of different ways, the first and main way it was marketed was when Jon Favreau took a few members of the cast to a Disney fan convention in Anaheim, and they showed some footage from the film, and handed out thousands of posters. This event would have received a lot of attention and got a lot of people interested in the film. Disney also spent $100,000 on TV advertising in the space of a week for the Jungle Book, so they were making sure that it reached everyone they possibly could. This also enabled Disney to attract an older audience as well as younger, as the footage shown was dark and appeared to be of the thriller genre. This is how they also attracted a secondary audience, as if kids wanted to go and see the film, their parents and even rest of their family would go with them.

The trailer of Jungle Book (2016) relates very closely to the original 1967 trailer, especially in areas such as scene change, sets and character positioning. However, it is obvious to all audiences that the 2016 trailer has a darker mood and colour tone in comparison with the ‘technicolour’ steered and cartoon like 1967 Jungle Book. The famous jazz singers of 1967 were really important because the Jungle Book was known for the soundtrack and they didn’t have a lot of famous actors at that time. However, in 2016 The Jungle Book had a variety of famous actors to play the different characters but they didn’t use famous jazz singers to create the soundtrack as it was not the most important aspect of the 2016 film. The posters in 2016 were similar in some ways to the 1967 posters as they used a variety of colour but the 2016 ones were more detailed and less family friendly. 

To conclude, marketing has obviously changed. You could argue that with its licensing deals with Kenzo and its focus on aggressively targeting a secondary audience to build profits on the back of a family audience who always turn out for Disney films you could argue that Disney have grown smarter and more precise with their planning, however we must also not forget that there are still lots of similarities between the two eras, for example the use of stars and red carpet premieres to promote a film remains in place as does the creation of character posters and trailers as the fundamental basics of  Disney marketing so to me what is  forgotten is that Disney as a conglomerate have always been a master at marketing, it is why they are the number one entertainment conglomerate in the world and  yes some of the practices have changed but the whole reason why there was new version of The Jungle Book in the first place was because of the success of the first film, a success driven by an effective marketing campaign.