Being part of an audience: patterns of contemporary film audience experience

Although audiences are often defined as being multiple, diffuse, and fragmented, in terms of film audiences there are five distinct patterns of experience within that multiplicity. These are individualised, group, venue-specific, global, and digital, and people are flexible in moving between them. Drawing on Livingstone’s (1998) notion of audiences being interactive and relational, we show that these patterns are created through the ways people interact with and relate to film. This is seen in the way people choose which film to watch, when, where, and with whom. People create and seek out specific audience experiences by choosing to take up opportunities to watch film at cinemas, at home, and through mobile devices. To understand how and why people create and select specific film audience experiences, we undertook 200 semi-structured interviews that explored audience members’ own experiences. This identified five patterns of experience, which our large sample survey confirmed occurred at scale. In general, people enjoy film through five distinct audience experiences, selecting and moving between these experiences.