Studios Reducing/Ending Retail DVDs of Classics - Warner Interview

Benjamin Button was a "much-derided" film? By whom and in what universe?

And Criterion has been doing "current" movies since the good old Laserdisc days. Nothing new about that.

The article talks about new releases, but what's the future for titles that are currently available online at Amazon and other retailers? Are the studios just going to allow everything to go OOP? 

If Best Buy got rid of all that direct-to-video junk they now sell and reduced the number of copies of Hollywood flops that they carry perhaps there'll be more room for the good stuff, no? There needs to be a dedicated outlet for movies - I can't remember the last time I was in a BB or Circuit Shitty (Rest in Pieces) to buy a movie; past experiences were so frustrating I just gave up on them.

Yeah I agree with you on that point. I suspect Criterion did the DVD simply because David Fincher was allowed by the studio to get them to do it.

It's a sobering article. Feltenstein basically confirms that the Archive titles will not be getting new telecines anytime soon. Sounds like the new mantra is "classic movies -- not as great looking as they used to be." They're not as cheap as they used to be either. Classic movies definitely have taken a few steps back, both in quality and affordability, and that's sad.

Another reason the article gives for the decline of classic movies on DVD is poor choice in the movies that were released:

If this is true, I would point to Warners as a contributor to these "irresponsible releases." Take their box sets; stuff like The Busby Berkeley set Volume 2, or those 4 box sets devoted to "camp classics." Even with box sets devoted to stars, Warner would never release all the great films associated with that star. For each set, they'd keep it to at the most 2 or 3 great films, with the rest being lesser entries, more obscure. Hence, in the Cagney set, we got "The West Point Story" over "The Strawberry Blonde." Warner also seemed to be using these sets as a way to combat the bootlegger, by trying to include some films that had never been released before on video, but were popular on the bootleg market, films like "Old Acquaintance," "A Slight Case of Murder," "Torrid Zone," "Picture Snatcher." All this was fine, but often times, it took the place of a more deserving film that had been released on video, a film now, years later, ends up in the Archive, unrestored, available only from a 20 + year old video master; a film that, if included, might have increased sales.
Edited by jdee28 - 8/7/2009 at 02:21 pm GMT
Edited by jdee28 - 8/7/2009 at 02:22 pm GMT
Edited by jdee28 - 8/7/2009 at 02:23 pm GMT
Edited by jdee28 - 8/7/2009 at 02:23 pm GMT
Edited by jdee28 - 8/7/2009 at 02:26 pm GMT

Well, I disagree with this point too. What constitutes a good or bad film is in the eye of the viewer, but more to the point, the article is supposedly lamenting the fact that lesser old films aren't being released. Well, the Fox Studio Classics Joan Collins collection is a perfect example of classic films properly released with excellent quality transfers and some nice extras. It wasn't expensive at all, the cost for me was AUD$10.50 per film (about US$8) including postage! I think that Stopover Tokyo and The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing are excellent films, and Rally 'Round the Flag Boys and Seven Thieves are very good, the only one I didn't really like was Sea Wife.

I do appreciate the over all point though that Fox probably spent hundreds of thousands of dollars making this DVD set, even though it most likely had a small potential market.

Yeah this quote is quite chilling:

So Warner's mantra about "full steam ahead" for classic releases was a bit of spin (to put it politely).

Another curious comment is this one:

I'm far from a restoration expert, but I find it surprising that restoration costs are increasing, I thought digital technologies would be reducing costs, while increasing quality?

I find that quote curious too. You'd think modern technology and new equipment would make it cheaper. I wonder if the author of the article really did his research, and if in fact the cost of restoration is truly growing.

Hi: Re "Costs of restoration," I didn't phrase it clearly enough, but the idea was that the expected quality of home video releases keeps increasing and therefore increases the cost. The amount of cleaning-up and restoration you had to do for VHS and laserdisc was less than what was expected for DVD, and hi-def in turn sometimes demands a whole new restoration. It is true that the cost of restoration shrank (or at least were controlled) with the development of new technology, and that that's one of the reasons we were able to see better-quality releases on DVD than we did on VHS.

The "much-derided" line about Benjamin Button refers to a number of things, particularly the outrage/arguments over on the Criterion forum, but obviously it doesn't mean that nobody has a right to like the movie. It's "much-derided" in the sense that Indiana Jones IV is "much-derided" -- that movie actually got pretty good reviews overall, but is a target of a lot of internet derision (though at least Benjamin Button never appeared on South Park).

The easiest way to proof those guys wrong is: buy the stuff that's being released on standard DVD because all those Home Entertainment reps will recognize this and that's what I'm doing. I'll be buying nearly all of Sony's upcoming titles, some are already preordered and I'll be buying Universal's Backlot titles and I'll continue buying Warner's standard releases and I'm looking forward to the next Flynn set for example and I really hope, some of the big names like Bogart or Davis will get another set.

Edit:

 

@Jaime_Weinman

Did you got the chance to talk with Mr. Feltenstein about upcoming projects on standard DVD?

Well, if this truly is an accurate take on what's happening in the market, then those folks who are waiting for title "X" on blu are in for a nasty surprise.  it's not like the market is going to magically come roaring back in 5 years.  If you can't make it cost effective on SD then we might as well forget about it.  Looks like they're ultimately positioning for some sort of digital delivery and we're entering a transition period.

We've heard the argument before that new releases are always guaranteed.  Of course the materials are in better shape plus the sales can ride on the publicity of the theatrical run.  Besides for some movies, they only hit the theater to advertise that the DVD will be coming out.

I do wonder if older movies will be lost forever.  If they aren't restored for DVD or Blu Ray, will they bother for broadcast TV?  Won't Joe Six pack figure out in a few years that the older movies don't look so good on the new TV?  Will these be restored?  If so, why not on Blu Ray or DVD?  Are we going to see less older movies on TV as well? 

Maybe everything will just become "On Demand".   This is why I'm not upgrading from standard DVD just yet. 

We've already had an entire generation of seeing less older movies on TV and this is the result.  It's now been about 20 years since "The Maltese Falcon," "Casablanca," the Busby Berkeley films, the Preston Sturges films and more used to play in prime-time on local independent stations such as Los Angeles' Channel 5.  In addition, the lesser classics were all over the dial on virtually every station filling all the non-prime slots now taken by infomercials.   Now, a generation later, few people under 30 know anything about movies made before 1980 because they haven't had this high visibility.

TCM is something of a golden ghetto for old movies.  The prints are run intact with no commercial interruptions and in transfers far superior to what local stations were using.  But new generations aren't going to accidentally stumble upon TCM when flipping through the hundreds of TV options as they did when those options could be counted on two hands.  So now, the chickens have come home to roost. 

I only hope that projects like the Warner Archive can get their act together and provide a reasonable alternative source for the titles we used to find in places like Tower Records.

Quote:
Exactly, Rob. I grew up with old movies on all the local Chicago broadcast channels, and now I teach at a film school where 90% of the students have never even HEARD of the Marx Brothers. Fortunately, they were delighted by a clip from DUCK SOUP.  Still, there was offered a Films of the 1930s class this fall and exactly ZERO students signed up. And now, TCM is the only channel really showing any movies made before 1990. The Godfather is pretty much the oldest movie of which these kids are aware and I'm sure in another 20 years, young people will have no knowledge of films that lack CGI and graphic scenes of torture.

It's not impossible for someone 30 or under (like myself) to find a great interest in classic films despite not seeing them on TV growing up. However, the general audience is definitely shrinking, and the older the film gets the less it will be revisited. The 80s is "old" to most of the target media purchasing demographic of teenager and young adults.

The DTV stuff sells much, much better than classic films.

 Why this should come as a surprise to so many, or so difficult to accept, is beyond me. It hasn't taken much reading between the lines over the past few years (decades, actually) to realize that the market for older films has shrunk dramatically, or that it's not a result of studio mismanagement of the market. The market for everything old has shrunk - you see the same thing with music and literature and just about every other aspect of the culture of the past. You could give this stuff as much exposure as you like, easily available and in the best possible form and still the vast majority of people today just wouldn't care. It's a cultural phenomenon, not a marketing thing. The attitudes, values and cultural perceptions that are reflected in the films of the past are increasingly alien to today's audiences, who, at best, regard them as quaint, but more frequently, simply irrelevant. Add to that the differences in film construction, particularly their pace, and you wind up with an audience that's just plain bored. Ideas of both what is entertaining and what makes something entertaining have changed. A Blu-Ray disc that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce and that tanked in the marketplace isn't going to make a particle of difference to today's typical movie viewer.

This isn't just the vast, unwashed, Joe Sixpack masses I'm talking about, either. Just last week, a couple of my acquaintance talked of having rented The Third Man on Blu-Ray. They're both intelligent, culturally-aware musician-artists in their late thirties. The guy told me his wife had managed to make it halfway through the film.

And yet we have people continuing to insist that if the studios went on just as they had in the past, spending vast amounts of money on things virtually guaranteed to not even recoup their expense, that things would be different.

Well, if there was a Vol. 2 of something that means Vol. 1 sold well enough to make it possible, so that's tough to categorize as an "irresponsible release".  As for the inclusion of certain titles in a box, Warner has often said that the state of existing materials was a factor.  I wouldn't necessarily chalk it up to holding back more notable titles to fill out a box or holding something back for future use.  Of course now, except for certain cases, that's no longer a worry.



What constitutes a good business decision, however, is not in the eye of the beholder as it is right there on a balance sheet.  What is implied here is that Fox did not get its return on the Joan Collins collection, irrespective of the films' quality, and probably for the reasons you cite as making it well worth it to you.  Multiply that a few times and Feltenstein's point stands.  I'm reminded of Fox putting millions into THE BLACK SWAN, which I purchased right after its release for $8.  They have my gratitude and my money, but I don't know how happy the bean counters were with that.      


It will be interesting to see what Sony and Universal are doing beyond this year.  If they're still in the business of classics in 2010 we should be very grateful.


Not impossible, but highly, highly, highly improbable.  And while the demographic is shrinking, money can always be made off a targeted, niche audience.  I don't see why there can't be room in these studio empires for a small, but money-making, operation.    

I would just add one small tweak to Paul Penna's point; older films have more awareness today than, say, 15 years ago, no (TCM, DVD, etc.)? So at some point the market did grow and there is perhaps a larger market now being ignored than in 1994.  And the bigger the market is, the less sense it makes to ignore it.   

Sony, even prior to the Warner Archive was announced, had a press release or a statement in an article discussing the same type of distribution, so that wouldn't shock me for them. But Sony is also benefiting from winning the HD format war, so they may be in a slightly better position financially than other studios.

The money will still be made off the niche audience, but that's also exactly why the Warner Archive titles are $20, which has solicited complaints from those who were buying classics on DVD much cheaper over the last 10 years, rightly or wrongly.

Time and sales will tell but there's too much doom and gloom around in those days and I'm quite optimistic that 2010 won't be so bad in terms of releases may be on par with this year and to me it's a good sign that two labels are starting to release catalog titles in these times, because they have faith that there's a market.

Why should we accept it?  As film buffs, movie lovers, whatever term you want to use, that love classic cinema we should do whatever we can to draw attention to classic films and to our desire to have them well-represented on DVD.  Our discussion of them can lead to others deciding to check them out for themselves.  In the courses I teach on production, I will discuss modern films with my students, but I also discuss, cite and show parts of classics to them.  They learn from them and in some cases discover a whole new realm of cinema.

I was born in 1956.  Coming of age in the late sixties and early seventies, the films of the 1930s were viewed as hopelessly quaint and totally irrelevant to the present.  And in the late sixties, being "relevant" was everything.

But there was a nostalgia factor and a sense of being clued into something outside the current tastes that made the Marx Bros. and Humphrey Bogart and W.C. Fields seem cool and to use a word probably not yet coined, "retro."  Some films and stars are of their time and have had their day in the sun.  Betty Grable was huge in own her time, but even in the sixties, was somewhat overlooked.  But other films and stars are timeless and can speak to new generations if they are only given the high visibility that broadcast television gave them years ago.

TCM, as grand as it is, can't do it alone.  The Warner Archive project can help, but the closing of all the brick and mortar stores is putting the final nail in the coffin unless something on the Internet like YouTube can turn things around.  Even after classic films left broadcast TV, the faces of Jean Harlow and Spencer Tracy were staring at us from all the VHS and laserdisc shelves at Tower Records, Big Ben, the Wherehouse, Virgin and all the other stores.  Now, it's getting to the point where it's just available online or not at all.  You have to type "Jean Harlow" into a search engine to find her now.  And if you don't know who Jean Harlow is, then you're not going to discover her by accident.

The films and stars we love will be swept away into the dustbin of history unless something comes along to shine a light on them again.  And it's only going to get worse for the stars of this century.  Heath Ledger now faces the same fate and it will happen quicker for him.  He won't have the 60 year grace period of posthumous popularity that television offered Jean Harlow.  The culture is too disposable now.

No, it doesn't come as a surprise, but I don't want to accept it.

Edited by Rob_Ray - 8/7/2009 at 11:59 pm GMT

Sadly, I must concur with Paul's statements.  It's not something I want to see, or want to admit, but it is what it is.  The vast majority of today's movie-viewing public, especially anyone under 30, simply couldn't care less about the classic films.  And for the exact reasons that Paul has given.  Heck, I find even many older folks (let's say, for sake of argument, people 50+ years old) seem to gravitate toward newer stuff.  I realize that's purely anecdotal, but it's what I'm seeing.   

Thank you, Steve, for starting this thread and linking an article that only confirms what I've feared for quite some time now.  Some of us have been predicting this downturn was coming way before the economy tanked.  I've personally been saying I saw this for a couple of years now.  It's a shame, but it's not a shock.


Gary "very thankful for TCM - it probably is the last bastion of vintage material at this point" O.

Unfortunately you don't get to see the balance sheet results until after you have actually released the DVDs and found out how well (or not) they have sold. The studios mainly predict sales using historical data on previous formats, which aren't necessarily a good guide for future sales. If Warner didn't take a punt on the first Film Noir box, it wouldn't of had a chance to sell double their estimate, which prompted them to release 3 other volumes. It is wrong for Feltenstein to criticise a competitor studio when that studio released a box of classic films the way they should be done, and possibly had good marketing data to suggest it could be a profitable release.

Interestingly, I wonder what this portends for things like Bowery Boys?  If Warner is convinced that the market is tanking for this material, and their retail release schedule certainly seems to bear that out, what form will this material take?  Once last gasp on SD or a dump into their Archives?  I know we've been told not to worry, it's destined for a proper release but, that's a year away.  Does anybody realistically see things getting any better in a year?  The economy should improve, but we're told the market started to die well before the economy.  Presumably the two things are independent, to a degree.

Made me go pre-order Esther Williams Vol. 2

I hadn't heard that about Sony, interesting. If the choice is a) doing nothing, b) MOD style model or c) downloads, I'd certainly prefer to see the studios go the MOD route. Not that I really have anything against 'c', but I imagine the studios would try something stupid, like restricting the consumer's 'use' under the DRM banner.    



I can see the studios looking at it in either of two ways.  One, they don't take into account the current climate, see 'low' sales (at least compared to 5 years ago) and scrap future releases. Or two, see the same sales in the context of the current climate as modest but something to build on. Unfortunately, the easy way is the first scenario. Then again, these sets could be a surprise hit and make this discussion irrelevant.  



What you're saying is true, but I think Feltenstein is referring to the end result--unsold product clogging up retailer shelves and causing those retailers to sour on classic releases.  Retailers returning product is a fact, the suppositions are towards explaining it, and there are really only two explanations--either there was no market or there were "irresponsible releases".  And we know there is a market for the right releases.  I may be parsing here but in the article he doesn't mention anybody specifically, his quote is placed after the writer's Joan Collins reference making it seem like he brought it up (which I guess he could have off the record).  Although he obviously is talking about other studios, I don't think he would directly criticize a competitor on a specific, well done release in an interview.

Does WB ever check Amazon Marketplace or fleabay for titles? I finally purchased the third Errol Flynn boxset earlier in the week and it arrived earlier from the time of my posting. Were it not for TCM, I'm 30, I wouldn't be such a huge aficianado and appreciator of older films.
Case in point: I'm quite a fan of James Mason and even DVR'd They Met in the Dark. HOLY SHIT I thought the movie was great! I also thank my local library system for having all those VHS of alot of older movies when I was younger.
That being said/typed-out, I don't support Warner Archives but I do support actual DVD releases. One particular set I'd love to get around to buying is The Thin Man Collection. I watched all of them on TCM and haven't had such fun laughter for comedy films in awhile. Just great. I'm even considering buying My Man Godfrey: The Criterion Collection DVD if I'm able to find a good price for it.
EDIT: Why not just have the Studios send all the older catalog titles to online retailers? I buy online alot so thins could actually be a positive outlet for their inventory.


Edited by Ray_R - 8/8/2009 at 09:41 pm GMT