identifying the market

obviously, you can't just bring a product to the market and hope for the best (despite how much you 'feel' the movie and simply want to...). hence, you have to do research into the market, enabling the budding film maker to identify if there is in fact a opportunity to make money and that the film will actually be watched. put simply, if this were a real product, this stage of the development would show that there is an actual place in the film market for what we make, thus giving confidence to both the producer and finacial backer. theres an easier way to say this i'm sure, but it would seem my mind has gone on holiday when i decided to write this. basically, identifying the market means looking at other films that are like yours and showing how well they did, which would mean that since your film is like those, is would make sense that it would do as good as the film you identified in this stage. also, if you can find a film that has already come out and had people seen it, and that film is like yours, then it means you already have a base target audience to work with. just a side note here, surely if you are doing a film thats already like something out there already then theres no originality in the thing your making? but then again, some would say that thats the challenge of being a film maker, to use whats already out there and put an origanal spin on it. of course, the idea of doing something totally new thats like nothing done in the last decade and putting it out with the hope that people will see it purely because its something different is just a pipe dream which in itself rises more questions. would people watch somethign thats so different? on that logic, it becomes essantial to use whats already been done and build upon it to ensure the film makes a profit. BUT that assumes all the film maker is interested in is money and not the art of self expression, thus leading us to the interesting point of the rivaling equilibrium between profitability and originaltiy. indeed the games industry can attest to this, with games that, while being of great quality, have done poor purely due to the fact they contain new ideas. what an interesting world the industry of telling stories has suddenly become.... still enough of this idealistic tangent and back to the task at hand:

ok, this is the first stage of identifying the market. at this point the depth i have reached with my ideas extends only to the point of genre, therefore meaning that at this point the only thing i can compare with the established market is the genre of my ideas. this, while effectivly rudimentry, will still give me an idea as to the possible market of all of my ideas. and so without hesistation (or another random idea on the film industry), here we go:

for my first idea, the action and adventure one, a prime example of the market world be either underworld 3 or the darl night. both have similar aspects of action and adventure, and both have done well in finacial terms thus showing that people did go to see them. overall, the dark night had a world wide gross of $1,000,245,358, while underworld 3 made $89,102,315 gross.
for my second idea, that of the thriller, examples of actual market products would be angles and demons, and eagle eye. both have characters that are against the clock, with from my intial thoughts about this idea, seems to be a major theme. money wise, angles and demons made $484,375,846 gross, while eagle eye achieved $178,066,569,
the third idea, horror, is the only one of my intial ideas that, in truth, requires no proof of a market. mainly, this is becasue of the fact of the sheer number of easliy identifiable horror movies that released each year. therefore, by the fact that they keep on making horror movies, we can see that there is a market. but to keep with my ongoing analyst, drag me to hell made a world wide gross of $79,525,024.
and finally, my fourth idea was to do something in the genre of family. needless to say really that family films always get the backing of that most reliable audience; young children who wont let there parents sleep until they have seen it. two clear examples of this are 'journey to the centre of the earth' and 'kung fu panada', which made $240,904,370 and $631,910,531 world wide respectivly.