BFI Statistical Yearbook 2014

As we can see from Table 4.1, the most popular genres of film in the UK in 2013 were Animation, Action and Comedy. Animation topped the box office charts with it raking in a whopping £246.6 million followed by Action at £215.4 million and Comedy at £158.2 million. Compared to the amount of Comedy and Action films that were released in 2013, the Animation genre released a smaller amount of films, which shows that Animation is well loved in the UK and the public would rather watch a more childish film even though they have more choice for Action and Comedy films.

We can also conclude that the Horror genre is more popular than the Thriller genre, at least in 2013, from Table 4.1 as, just like with Animation compared with Action/Comedy, there is a smaller number of releases but there is a higher success rate at the box office. Horror also took in £57.5 million but only produced 5.3% of all releases in the UK in 2013 (37 films). Thriller made £29.1 million but produced more of the releases (9.2%).

Table 4.2 shows how Sci-fi topped the board in terms of WPR (Widest Point of Release) with the average number of sites being 422, followed by Western and Fantasy at 327 and 280. In terms of Horror genre releases in 2013 (37) and Thriller genre releases (64), we can see that even though there were less releases from Horror it still produced a higher average number of sites at widest point of release (145) than the Thriller genre which only had 89 as it's average site number at WPR, proving that the Horror genre serves as the most popular choice of the two.

Adventure topped the charts in terms of the highest earned from the box office. From Table 4.3 we can see that Horror produced a higher average at the box office, over £5,000 more on average compared with Thriller, indicating that the genre proves popular in cinemas despite the fact that it was shown at a smaller number of sites.

Table 4.4 shows that despite only having 9 releases (6.5% of all releases in the UK) in 2013, Action still managed to take in the most amount of money from the box office (£64.1 million), with Music/dance placing second and raking in £47.9 million.    

From Figure 4.1, we can see that neither Horror or Thriller took in a reasonable amount from the box office, however out of the two, Horror received the most in terms of All Films/UK films, but Thriller took in more in the UK independent films category. From Figure 4.2, we can see that Thriller produced a good number of releases and so it's results at the box office tells us that the genre wasn't very popular with audiences despite having released more than Horror and over 10 other genres.