Paul_Warren
Supporting Actor
Amazed Indiana Jones sold 122000 copies in US alone generating $5.163m imagine the worldwide outside US figures way higher for all these titles
What kind of incentives would convince people to become new customers? (ie. Besides giving them away for free).FoxyMulder said:I just think it's a really sad day when some of these films can't even sell 10,000 copies each, they struggle at selling a few thousand, there has to be some way to improve that, there has to be a way of marketing them or some sort of incentives they can offer to increase the sales
That study was done on American's note how it's the opposite for Asia and probably different for Europe too, so i am immune from said criticism. All the same it's an interesting read and apparently real knowledge is to know one's ignorance, heavy and deep, then i guess i have gained knowledge today because i do feel ignorant on this subject matter, i just want catalog to sell better.jcroy said:(As an aside).
Sounds sorta like the Dunning-Kruger effect in action.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
jcroy said:What kind of incentives would convince people to become new customers? (ie. Besides giving them away for free).
Touche.FoxyMulder said:That study was done on American's note how it's the opposite for Asia and probably different for Europe too, so i am immune from said criticism.
Even worse are the ones who stuck with VHS and never moved on to dvd (or bluray).FoxyMulder said:Maybe it's just impossible to sell some, i would have thought there was a good proportion of older people who would exercise their buying power to buy catalog, it makes me think maybe many are happy with dvd and think blu ray doesn't benefit older titles, that's where the studio, if they care, has to get the message across that older titles can benefit from blu ray.
I don't think there's any difference amongst younger demographics in the UK because my experience is also that young people here have zero interest in anything other than modern films. When I was amongst numerous young family members last Christmas, a collective groan went up as the TV announcer said BEN-HUR would be on next and they quickly switched the channel! I'm sure that an interest in classic films has always been a minority interest - and that applies to most adults as well. Loking at those sales figures I'd say we are lucky to get any classic titles on Blu-ray at all.Robert Crawford said:Now, this is a generalization so there are definitely exceptions to the opinions I'm about to express here. First off, I'm speaking from the American POV which might be quite different than other parts of the world as I always suspected classic films are more popular among the younger demographic in those locations than they are here in America. I think the younger demographic here never really appreciated B&W films nor movies not filmed in widescreen. During this video age, I'd had numerous conversations with much younger people than I about films and I constantly hear the same kind of apathy towards those kind of films. I feel the same type of disinterest to those younger people that like westerns or war films for example, but refuse to watch such films made beyond the 1960's or even 1970's in some cases.
Same thing with my dad. He used to tease me about liking movies letterboxed, I remember back in the day when cable channels first started showing movies in widescreen and we still had a 4x3 TV, he'd channel surf and land upon some awful movie, and tease, "Hey Josh, it's in widescreen, that means it's better, right?"Adam Gregorich said:I remember years ago when my mom still had a 4x3 set she was playing back a copy of Sixth Sense on DVD that looked awful. Everything was stretched out. I found that it was set for a 16x9 TV in the DVD player. I fixed it and instead of saying it looked better (which it did), she said it looked worse because of the black bars! She would rather look at a distorted picture than the $(&-? Black bars.
My father is still complaining how he "spent $$$ on a big screen TV so why is the picture almost always never filled up?". I've tried explaining the various ratios (4:3, 1:85 etc) but he is still very annoyed when a widescreen film still has black bars. Me, I've never minded in the least.SeanAx said:Do you remember the first few years when widescreen TVs become affordable to almost every household and a lot of folks bought their first sets? I can't speak to your experience, but I constantly would walk into the homes of friends and sometimes family and notice that old Academy ratio TV shows were stretched to fit the widescreen. I would point this out and they never even noticed and in some cases preferred to simply fill the frame even if it was wrong.
If so many people don't care about easily discernible distortions to familiar programs, then why would they care about the difference between a streaming image and a disc?
That's not everyone, of course, but we who care very much about quality are a minority and possibly not one big enough to sustain the kinds of sales necessary to sustain a business bigger than what we now enjoy.
I've been saying that forever, but some around here don't see it as they keep trying to place the blame on the studios instead of circumstances outside their control. We always have to have somebody to blame, when we see failure, even though there isn't one individual to blame for that failure.Persianimmortal said:I really don't see this as a marketing issue. A lot of people I know just aren't interested in classic movies, even when forced to watch them. They giggle at the dialog, laugh at outdated special effects, and get bored if more than 5 minutes goes by without a car chase scene or gunfight. No amount or type of marketing is going to get these people to buy these older movies on Blu. It simply boils down to a matter of taste, or dare I say, a lack thereof. And for those people who do enjoy classic cinema, the vast majority seem more than happy with the DVD version. It's a relatively straightforward if somewhat inconvenient truth that classics on BD will not sell well.
If they sell well enough to make a release feasible then this is all we need.The problem is that if it doesn't have the potential to make big money there seems to be little interest from certain parties.Luckily TT saw a potential market where others (including many studio people) didn't. It seems that Nick Redman did not read some of the threads over here and in other places attentively enough as otherwise he would not have started with the futile endeavour of releasing catalog titles on Blu-rayPersianimmortal said:I really don't see this as a marketing issue. A lot of people I know just aren't interested in classic movies, even when forced to watch them. They giggle at the dialog, laugh at outdated special effects, and get bored if more than 5 minutes goes by without a car chase scene or gunfight. No amount or type of marketing is going to get these people to buy these older movies on Blu. It simply boils down to a matter of taste, or dare I say, a lack thereof. And for those people who do enjoy classic cinema, the vast majority seem more than happy with the DVD version. It's a relatively straightforward if somewhat inconvenient truth that classics on BD will not sell well.
Another question to ask is whether the corporate division handling the new first-run movies is autonomous or completely independent from the division handling the home video dvd/bluray/streaming releases.OliverK said:OK, off my soap box now but it pains me to see how very often the subject of catalog is approached with timidity instead of boldness especially when the financial risks for many of those releases is really limited compared to the multi million dollar risks that the studios are taking with new theatrical releases.
Judging by the numbers for The Jungle Book and in relation to DNR (as TJB was pretty well DNR'd), looks like about 719,000 folks actually liked the DNR in the movie.Simon Lewis said: