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Bangor University DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY The Pleistocene Protagonist: Predicting Chinese, North American and global box office success through an evolutionary analysis of film protagonists Pelican, Kira-Anne Award date: 2017 Awarding institution: Bangor University Link to publication General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal ? Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 09. Oct. 2021 The Pleistocene Protagonist: Predicting Chinese, North American and global box office success through an evolutionary analysis of film protagonists Kira-Anne Pelican A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy March 2017 School of Creative Studies and Media College of Arts and Humanities Bangor University ABSTRACT The process of selecting which screenplays to “greenlight”, or fully finance for production, is one of the most important stages in film production since the cost of acquiring and developing a screenplay is negligible compared to the later costs of producing, marketing and distributing a film. Despite this, very little is known about the contribution that elements of a film’s narrative make towards a film’s box office performance. In this thesis I examine the widely-received idea that “primal” aspects of film protagonists, including their personality traits, motivations and emotions, contribute significantly towards a film’s universal appeal as measured by worldwide ticket sales. I also interrogate the proposition that certain protagonist qualities are universally liked by audiences. Drawing on models of human behaviour advanced by evolutionary psychologists, I propose that an evolutionary framework will illuminate our understanding of film protagonists and their associated audience appeal. I report the development of a new instrument to assess differences in film protagonists’ emotions, motivations and character traits, and then use this questionnaire in five studies. Through analysis of 170 films exhibited in North America and China between 1995 and 2014, I find the questionnaire to be comprehensive. I also find that the psychological attributes of a film protagonist may be used to predict the territory in which a film is preferred, whether a film is likely to rank in the top ten at the North American box office and whether a high-budget film is more likely to be a global box office hit or flop. These findings are consistent with evolutionary theories, which would suggest that screen characters’ traits, motivations and emotions are writers’ emulations of universal adaptations to evolutionary selection pressures, reshaped through aesthetic and cultural processes. I conclude that an evolutionary framework offers useful insights into which aspects of film protagonists may be universally liked. It also reveals cross-cultural variation in audiences’ preferences for films with protagonists with certain attributes. Finally, I argue that this knowledge may benefit the industrial greenlighting process and screenwriting pedagogy. 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 19 Mitigating risk in the film industry .......................................................................... 23 Screenplay craft rules ............................................................................................... 26 Defining the “universal” in “narrative universals” .................................................. 28 The structuralist approach to narrative universals ................................................... 28 Psychological approaches to narrative universals .................................................... 31 From evolutionary psychology to fictional film narratives ..................................... 33 The process of characterization ............................................................................... 34 Psychological measures of cultural preferences ...................................................... 36 Research questions and original contributions to knowledge .................................. 37 Research design ....................................................................................................... 40 Methodological considerations ................................................................................ 41 Chapter layout .......................................................................................................... 46 Concluding remarks ................................................................................................. 48 The Business of Film ....................................................................................................... 50 Film production in the United States ....................................................................... 53 The contemporary film production landscape in China ........................................... 57 Academic research into box office forecasting ........................................................ 61 Development and pre-production factors ................................................................. 65 Writer ............................................................................................................... 66 Price paid for the screenplay ............................................................................ 67 Genre ................................................................................................................ 67 Adaptations of books ....................................................................................... 68 Adaptations of true stories ............................................................................... 68 Sequels and franchises ..................................................................................... 69 Remakes ........................................................................................................... 69 Reboots ............................................................................................................ 70 Film ratings ...................................................................................................... 70 Runtime ............................................................................................................ 72 Storyline ........................................................................................................... 73 3 Textual aspects of the screenplay .................................................................... 75 Characters ........................................................................................................ 75 Production and post-production factors ................................................................... 77 Production budgets ........................................................................................... 77 Star power ........................................................................................................ 78 Director ............................................................................................................ 79 Composer ......................................................................................................... 80 Nation of production ........................................................................................ 80 Distribution and reception ........................................................................................ 80 Critical ratings .................................................................................................. 80 Awards ............................................................................................................. 82 Word of mouth “buzz” ..................................................................................... 83 Date or season of theatrical release .................................................................. 84 Market power of distributor ............................................................................. 85 Number of screens ........................................................................................... 85 Advertising expenditure ................................................................................... 86 Market competition .......................................................................................... 86 Nation of reception .......................................................................................... 87 Directions for future research .................................................................................. 87 The Search for Narrative Universals Part 1: Structuralist Approaches ........................... 89 Aristotle and the structure of poetry ........................................................................ 92 Establishing the hero pattern