Cohesion in physical movie releases: developing a framework for the multimodal analysis of complex three-dimensional packaging

Three-dimensional packages are complex multimodal ensembles and serve important communicative functions for the discursive construction of marketing strategies or social and cultural values to be conveyed by the products they contain. One particularly interesting type of such packages is that of physical movie releases. In this article, we offer an exploratory study into how multimodal cohesion analysis can be applied to these artefacts. While multimodal cohesion has mainly been analysed in narrative artefacts such as films or comics, the examination of three-dimensional packages is a new field of application within the broad context of multimodality research. Building on existing theories and frameworks for multimodal cohesion analysis, we suggest a five-step framework to fit the genre of three-dimensional packaging. A case study using three releases from the film distribution company Eureka is employed to test the developed framework. The analysis shows that the majority of relations between units in and on these packages is of the type ‘repetition’. These relations are established both through verbal and visual elements, both with regards to form and content. The repetition of style results in a strong uniformity, whereas the repetition of contents allows the object to understandably convey information despite its three-dimensional non-linear structure.