Official Movie Websites: Communicative Spaces, Paratexts and Intertextuality

In recent years, the official websites of the commercial cinema have undergone significant changes thanks to the development of programming languages, and the film industry’s need to stimulate the audience who is provided with an increasing supply of content in the entertainment field. Throughout its steady evolution, official websites have been transformed from being an inert space with contents from other media to becoming a space capable of building more complex communicative proposals. Hence, a generation of promotional content is emerging in these spaces, which explores new interactive forms, enhances user participation, and experiments with the creation of film-related experiences. In order to approach this unexplored field, the present work addresses the official websites from three different perspectives: web pages as communication spaces supporting a series of factors that influence the communicative proposals; the different paratexts that can be used in these spaces, analyzing and classifying them on the basis of how they are utilized; and, finally, the different types of intertextuality used in these websites to generate a stream of promotional synergies targeted towards the film.