Re: Warner Bros. upsets me
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Originally Posted by Mike*SC
MatthewA, your first statement is akin to saying "I'm sick of the fatalistic 'there's gravity' excuse for why I can't fly!" Your anger is evident, your point is not.
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At least I'm not making false analogies. Gravity is a fact. It has been a fact ever since the days of Sir Isaac Newton. It can be demonstrated by science. The sales of a TV show DVD are speculated based on the iffy information that trickles out from people whose honesty is suspect. The first season DVD set was called a "staggering failure" by a Fox employee and held up as the poster child for TV-DVD bombs. Yet we later learned that it sold 150,000 copies. A drop in the bucket compared to something like "The Simpsons," yet nothing to sniff at. Either Fox has been lying about the show's performance on DVD, or its production process was criminally inefficient. Recently David Levine, an industry insider with access to sales figures, claimed that this show did well on DVD. There is more to this issue than what we are hearing, certainly more than mere dollars and cents, and I want to know.
Perhaps I was not clear. Speed Racer cost reportedly $120,000,000 (according to the seldom-reliable IMDb). It grossed $43,000,000. That's 35% of its cost in gross alone, and net will be less. That is a failure by any means. This company should be held up as a business that knows how to manage its finances, when a movie version of a cheapjack 1960s Japanese cartoon should cost what used to be able to make 10 movies (and could, outside of California)? With that kind of dough they could release every season of every TV show they owned to DVD and have enough left over to promote it. This movie shouldn't have cost more than $60,000,000. I suggested tax write-offs because:
A. It has been done before. When they still owned United Artists, Transamerica wrote off the huge losses on "Heaven's Gate" on their taxes.
B. Costs involved in the production of a DVD of a TV show that does not meet sales expectations could never equal a movie that lost a proportionate amount of money. But with the bloated infrastructure of studios (Warner Bros. was one of those singled out for charging $5000 for 35mm telecine of one episode of a TV series, but even for a 26-episode season that would be only $130,000) I can see why a "sure thing" can backfire.
And if Fox is not, in fact, losing money on MTM (considering that they released only a number of units sold, not how much it made in terms of what return the studio saw on its investment, or how big they), why don't they continue? They're willing to give up profit (if indeed there was any) because it's not big enough? Talk about penny wise and pound foolish. How limited are their resources? The problems may also be internal. In-house transfer and mastering costs may be bloated, but having outside materials handle these may be a solution.
Quite frankly, I don't care one way or another if these studios go bankrupt as long as I get what I want. Frankly, if all the studios collapsed I would feel nothing but schadenfreude. For their arrogance and inability to sell proven successes on DVD, they deserve to fail. And fail spectacularly. But consumers and fans suffer the most.
My vitriol is well-grounded and justified and will continue until someone releases the rest of The Mary Tyler Moore Show on DVD. It boggles the mind how many people can make excuses for these people, and shout down any suggestions that might make it better.
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Originally Posted by bmasters9
I'd like to know, MatthewA-- what do you mean when you say that you are sick and tired of shows like "Friends" being treated as anything other than an American tragedy? That sounds like an interesting statement.
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It's merely a creative way to say I hate this show, everything involved with it, everyone involved with it, and its continued popularity, not to mention how its DVDs outsold better TV shows (like every other show in history) makes me physically ill. This is not far from hyperbole. The show was an unfunny, vapid debacle that made stars out of no-talent hack actors. Its influence on sitcoms has been catastrophic. I've seen some clunkers in my day, but if I ever see a bigger bomb than this it's off to the fallout shelter for me.
