Film release audience tracker

The audience survey data we’d collected on distribution awards via the Audience Fund (which ran from April 2017 to March 2023) was coming from a small section of the market that agreed to survey their customers via post-screening exit surveys (paper surveys handed out at screenings) and online surveys. We were also aware that audience data on individual film titles was not widely available to the independent film sector, with research focused on larger, mainstream films and prohibitively expensive for independent distributors to be part of and access.

The aim of this audience tracking project was to provide the independent film sector with audience data on a wide range of titles, from a representative sample of the UK population. 

There were five waves of the survey, with fieldwork occurring every three months between March 2022 and April 2023. Each wave had a sample of between 4,000 to 5,000 UK adults aged over 16. The sample was weighted to be nationally representative for age, gender, UK nation and region, social grade, and ethnicity. In each wave, respondents completed a 15-minute survey which explored a set of awareness and engagement questions for a set of 18 to 20 films released in the three months period prior to the survey.

You can view the data (including audience demographic data and audience awareness drivers and engagement triggers) on individual films in the documents listed below. 

The data (percentages) you’ll see on these documents relate to the reach of the films among the sample surveyed, except for the awareness drivers and engagement triggers where the percentage relates to the response amongst those who were aware of the film (awareness drivers) and those who have seen or are interested in seeing the film (engagement triggers). The sample size and demographic breakdown of the sample, relevant to the wave of the survey the applicable film was included on, can be found on each document for benchmarking against the results. 

Before looking at this data, read the notes at the end of this page highlighting caveats regarding this audience tracker’s research methodology and outputs, where they may have had an impact on the results. 

Measuring low incidence behaviour

The objective of this audience tracker was to provide audience data for BFI Audience Fund supported film releases and some other key releases. This included monitoring films which have had limited release strategies and low levels of broad population-level engagement. Measurement of such low incidence viewing behaviour has meant, in the case of some releases, reported outputs are based on relatively low sample sizes. The constraint of small sample sizes increases the likelihood of less robust and reliable data. This is due to a higher degree of statistical deviation and consequent volatility of results which can occur with low samples. We therefore recommend a degree of caution in the interpretation of some of the outputs in the reports, particularly where the number of survey respondents who have seen a film is less than 70.

It was evident in the tracker’s outputs that there was a degree of recall confusion and misattribution (for example, confusing a film for another film with a similar title) of claimed film engagement behaviours. This may have partly been because a text rather than image-based prompt was used as stimulus to measure the respondent’s film release awareness and engagement. The data for a small number of films has been omitted from the datasets where there was a clear and significant degree of misattribution. 

Despite these caveats we do hope this data will be interesting and useful. We aren’t continuing with this specific audience tracker project, but we have learnt a great deal from it and are working with colleagues in our Research and Statistics unit on how we can build on these learnings and look to better capture audience data on film releases going forwards.