Industry

• films targeted at niche audiences eg Asian British audiences will often find it difficult to get financing from the big film companies like Disney or Sony. This is because the most successful and profitable films at the worldwide box office in 2019 were mass audience targeted blockbusters from the SciFi and superhero genre.
• The film was co-funded by Levantine films, Bend it Films, and Ingenious media, was also co-funded by New Line Cinema who also distributed it.
• New Line cinema- also however a subsidiary of the major hollywood warner brothers pictures who make the big budget superhero movies in the DC Universe which compete with Marvel. Warner bros pictures itself is a part of the major conglomerate Warner media.
• hesmondhalgh suggests that companies should not create a new product without basing it on something that is existing and successful- Gurinder Chadha did this due to Safraz Manzoor's book- Greetings from Bury Park
• levantine films is a small company that offers funding for films about underrepresented groups in society eg ethnic minorities,
• ingenious media added more investment to the film, and again has had some major successes with films such as The Life Of Pi.
• basing the film on a pre-sold book would bring in pre-sold fans of the book, and reduce risk
• the narrative being centered around world famous singer Bruce Springsteen's music, brings in pre-sold fans and reduces risk further
• Springsteen's own management company who owns the rights to his songs have Chadha the rights to use Springsteen's songs at a highly discounted rate
• the film would have been appealing to ethnic minority audiences and also to white audiences who disagreed with all the racism/xenophobia in the media at the time
• the low budget/genre of the film meant they shot on location mostly around Luton
• the production company was not vertically integrated so this meant they were not able to distribute themselves, they needed to outsource the distribution
• finding a distribution deal is hard, entering a film into a festival can attract distribution companies
• Because of their entry and showing at the 'sundance film festival' lots of distribution companies made bids to do a deal to distribute the film'
• paramount distributed the film on DVD and Blu Ray
• they also managed to distribute it on amazon prime which allowed them to target modern, online audiences as well as reaching out to new audiences via the suggested films feature
• Entertainment One distributed the film in the UK as well as in New Zealand and Australia
• New Line Cinema released Blinded by The Light at a similar time to the film Yesterday released by Universal. Bend It Films blamed this on their low US box office takings as they felt it would have confused and diluted the audience
• with New Line/WB being part of such a big company, it meant the film was able to have quite a big marketing campaign, had a trailer focused on the 80s,
• the producers regularly retweeted positive comments about the film to help with Word Of Mouth advertising.
• Set in a dreary and intolerant 1987
• Bend it networks production company is headed by Gurinder Chadha OBE and the screenwriter Paul Mayeda Berges