Fox Searchlight Pictures President Peter Rice and Warner Bros. Pictures Group President Jeff Robinov announced that the companies would join forces on the North American release of Slumdog Millionaire. The project was initiated at Film4 who co-developed and co-financed the film with UK production company Celador Films. The film is produced by Celador's Christian Colson. Film4 chief Tessa Ross and Celador Films Chairman Paul Smith act as executive producers. Fox Searchlight Pictures is a specialty film company that both finances and acquires motion pictures. It has its own marketing and distribution operations, and its films are distributed internationally by Twentieth Century Fox. Fox Searchlight Pictures is a unit of Fox Filmed Entertainment, a unit of Fox Entertainment Group.
The distribution of the film sparked a lot of interactivity and exchange between movie-goers and Danny Boyle films, as this was primarily the intended audience. The internet distributed key concepts before the release of the film - the soundtrack is available on youtube and its own website has the trailer on it. Social networking sites have attracted people to watch the film through high concept posters which has generated a lot of buzz as they are becoming more and more popular. TV adverts for the film and DVD/Blue ray releases (around early June 2009) has caused exchange on youtube and have since created fansites and blogsites dedicated to film actors/actresses/directors involved.
Youtube has the trailers of the film and has attracted a large audience because of its mixture of eastern and western music music, the use of bright colours to make it visually appealing and connoting the array of emotions and twists in the film and the theme of rags-to-riches to make it relatable to some of the audience. Phone applications have been used through Apple iPod stores to attract those through creating games and competitions and again generating a buzz - a 'commercial tie-ins'. The release of DVD and Blue-ray would have attracted another audience of HD films, which is already popular in America. Due to the time and development of media such as television, radio and cameras, this shows there is a revolution of how and when people can watch these films. The film was originally released as a mainstream idea and was primarily released to a limited audience, but was well received by North America an Europe so they released it to a wider audience 2 months later.
