Avatar 2 poster audience responses

This post for James Cameron's long awaited 'Avatar' sequel is a fairly typical one in terms of film marketing, and can be categorised as a 'floating head' poster, one which showcases the star power of the film. In terms of audience, the target audience for this film is clearly a wide group of people as we know from the financial success of the first films. Codes such as the fantasy creatures and the alien nature of the Na'vi indicate that this is a film of the fantasy genre and something very escapist. We can immediately surmise that the target audience are interested in entertainment above all else, and as far as demographic they might be anywhere from children who are seeing this for the first time to young adults who remember the first film and are intrigued by why it took so long for a sequel to release. The first avatar had a global audience, as one of the reasons it was such a hit was because Cameron released the film literally everywhere he could, and so the audience for this could be from anywhere. As far as appeals go, the pleasant colours of the poster are eye catching and from the positioning and appearances of the characters it is made clear that this is a film with strong themes of family and togetherness, which appeals directly to a mainstream audience, who find comfort and familiarity in these ideas. In terms of uses and gratification, a lot of the appeal of this is entertainment and escapism, but also social interaction, as this film was no doubt going to be a smash hit. These ideologies of family and relationships is all part of the preferred and intended reading, which is what the encoders intended to evoke using this imagery.