Who would distribute our film and its promotional material?

We looked at Western films past and present to choose a distributor for our film. We came up, eventually, with a list of six, which we researched further.

Lions Gate Entertainment Corporation is a Canadian-American entertainment company. They are the distributor for one of the main films we looked at: 310 to Yuma. Founded in 1996, in Vancouver, as of 2010, it is the 8th most successful production company in North America. Its highest grossing films are 2004's Fahrenheit 9/11 and 2010's The Expendables. Besides 310 to Yuma, it has no more Westerns to its credit.

Warner Bros. Pictures is a subsidiary company of the hugely successful media conglomerate TimeWarner. They have been the distributor and producer for numerous Westerns, such as Unforgiven, The Assasination Of Jesse James, Wyatt Earp and the Western-style comic book adaptation Jonah Hex. Founded in 1918, it is number 1 in the list of the top six major film distributors in the world. Its top-grossing films include The Dark Knight and The Harry Potter series.

New Line Cinema distributed Apaloosa, one of the few Westerns of recent. Founded in 1967, it was an independent studio until 1996, when it became a subsidiary of TimeWarner. It was merged with its sister Warner Bros. in 2008. Now less than ten films are released per year using the name.

Paramount Pictures is America's oldest film studio, founded in 1912. A subsidiary of media congolmerate Viacom, it has distributed many prominent Westerns such as Once Upon A Time In The West, Brokeback Mountain, Seraphim Falls and the upcoming remake of True Grit. It has also distributed the film No Country For Old Men, a film that, while not being set during the typical "Western" period, arguably includes many commonly seen Western elements. It is number 2 in the top 6 film studios of today.

After looking at all these studios, we have decided our film could be distributed by Warner Bros. Warner Bros. has a number of successful Westerns to its credit already, and given its power as the most successful film distributor in the world, would ensure the film has a large distributional area.