Studios Reducing/Ending Retail DVDs of Classics - Warner Interview (1 Viewer)

[James 'Tiger' Lee]

Facts about one class do not speak for an entire generation, which is what I interpeted the post as being about. And I'd thank you, Mr. BrianI to not use that as an excuse to rip into me, just because I'm not a pessimist about MY generation

Edited by James 'Tiger' Lee - 8/8/2009 at 07:34 pm GMT

 

[Jay E]

Originally Posted by Billy Batson

The Hammer films for release in September are exclusive to a company called Movie Mail, so it looks like a deal between them & Sony. They are: The Camp On Blood Island, Yesterdays Enemy, & The Damned (US These Are The Damned), all 'scope & b/w.

The Damned is my second most wanted title (after the one on the left), so I am going to wait until Sony releases it in Region 1 (it should be coming out next year)..
MovieMail has had an exclusive agreement with Sony for a while now, with titles such as The Wrong Box & The Hireling out on DVD through their website.

 

[Jay E]

Sorry, double post.

 

[James 'Tiger' Lee]

I sometimes wonder if there was simply too much crowded on the market at one time. Most people I expect like many genres, so we were probably rushing around buying classic films, but not enough of particular titles to help them sell

 

[Matt Stieg]

I sometimes wonder if there was simply too much crowded on the market at one time. Most people I expect like many genres, so we were probably rushing around buying classic films, but not enough of particular titles to help them sell

I agree with that. There's quite a number of old films on DVD that I have never even seen but would gladly buy blindly (I do so quite often); but I simply don't have enough money. It's as simple as that.

 

[MatthewA]

This 26-year-old can also vouch for the veracity of Mr. Kozlowski's statement. I was in a film school where the students, after watching "Lawrence of Arabia," complained that David Lean should have cut to another shot after 7 seconds. What philistinism, I thought. It made me angry. It is no stereotype. It is a fact. This is one of many reasons I feel I can't relate to the generation to which I belong. Insult us all you want: we deserve it.

In my opinion the declining interest in classic films (and TV shows as well) is almost as bad as the declining interest in fine art, music, drama, not to mention ignorance of history (a very popular malady these days), declining mathematical skills, rapidly declining manners, even more rapidly growing provincialism, etc. Blame the schools, blame MTV and Entertainment Tonight, blame the current generation of hack filmmakers who only know about life from other films, blame whoever you want, but only solutions will do anything about it. Mandatory art education in all grades may help.

Originally Posted by BrianRi

Stereotype?!? Get a grip, my feline friend. Rob_Kozlowski is a teacher who was stating facts (you know, those icky things that get in the way of our preconceptions) about a class that was offered, and then used his observations of students at his school to make a generalization. There are always exceptions,. I was a film studies major in the late '90s, an am completely in accord with Mr. Kozlowski's point-of-view. At my school, all the young whippersnappers could talk about was how cool Quentin Tarantino made violence look. I remember hearing a couple guys deride and mock Double Indemnity as being so "old-fashioned". I have many other like anecdotes. Generalization or exception to the rule? Generalization or stereotype? I say it's the big G all the way. And I say it's entirely justified. You don't? Fare thee well, Mr. James 'Tiger' Lee.

 

[James 'Tiger' Lee]

I personally have found people of my age who do enjoy and respect the classics. I have also found people who don't, but so what? You're always going to find people with different tastes and perceptions. Criticising how David Lean handles a shot is not being a "phillistine", it is called an opinion.

 

[PaulaJ]

[COLOR= rgb(24, 24, 24)]TCM isn't the *only* channel out there showing old movies; Fox Movie Channel shows golden oldies along with its more recent fare, and the MGMHD channel shows movies going back to the 1960s... in high def. I now have a widescreen high def version of Fitzwilly on my DVR -- a great improvement over the pan and scan VHS tape. Encore's Westerns channel also shows a lot of older westerns. Not that this is quite the same as the myriad of local channels that used to show old films which introduced an entire generation to the pleasures of older films, of course.

I am a staffer at a university and the kids for the most part are unaware of anything before their birth unless they heard about it in class. I hire a work-study student every year to work in my office and the vast majority of them are completely unaware of older films. They might have heard of Humphrey Bogart. [/COLOR]

 

[Nebiroth]

"Digital Delivery" will at long last give the studios their pot of gold as far as controlling distribution is concerned.

They will finally once again operate as monopolies. Forget any idea about independent stores, sales, special offers or anything like that. It will be the deathknell of international sales. Think Warner Archive, only ten times worse because nothing will ever "leak" into the secondary market.

The studios will finally have what they always wanted: absolute and total control of what is available, when, where and how much they can charge for it.

You only have to look at the Amazon download service - unless you have a friend who trusts you with his or her credit card, they know when you're not in the USA and you can't get hold of the stuff.

If it;s doing to be streaming services, that's even worse: held in thrall to a digital deity that can pull whatever it likes whenever it likes. Favourite movie withdrawn from the list? Tough; you'll never see it again.

 

[RickER]

I think old movies will still get released, even if very slowly. The DVD and Blu-ray production plants need to crank out stuff. Production plants need to keep product coming. Ten years plus into the DVD market, everything "big" is out, so the studios will have to look at what they have.
Night of the Creeps is coming out next month. I bought that movie on LD back in the day, and it hasnt seen a video release since then. Its not a classic, but it is a cult title. I hope to see Futureworld, and Year of the Comet, among others, get a release someday!

Funny story, i was asking some co-workers if they had ever seen Torchwood. No one had heard of it, they asked what was it about. I said its kind of like a British X Files. None of my late 20 something co workers know what The X Files was! They must of not been allowed to watch it when they were kids!
How do you not know what it is, even if you never watch it!

 

[Simon Howson]

I won't pay for movie downloads until they are DRM free. I want to be able to take the file and convert it to a DVD so I know that I will always be able to play it.

I am hopeful this will happen soon, I mean not that long ago all music files on iTunes had DRM.

 

[Tony J Case]

So if studios cant make money on releasing old flicks on DVD, then how in the hell is it that small studios without deep pockets managed to thrive and survive on nothing BUT older flicks? Just looking at DVD drive-in, Navarre/Code Red are releasing Deliver Us from Evil and Fox Affair along with Teenage Graffiti and Teenage Mother (plus Code Red is releasing a single disc with Stunt Rock all by itself). Severin Films is releasing Screwballs in a couple of months.

So if they can do it with films that nobody has ever heard of (outside of weirdos like me) then why the hell cant The Big Studios do it with Hammer flicks or the like?

 

[Richard M S]

There are a couple of things going on here I need to comment on, especially since I bought just about every classic set Warners released. The line “there are some complaints from fans who have been trained by DVD to “want everything now, and everything in the best possible quality” really annoys me. While I agree we wanted everything now, we wanted to PAY for everything now. Look, I realize the films of Marie Dressler, Margaret Sullavan, and Robert Montgomery may not have made them any money; the WarnerArchives is the best place for them (though I would have purchased box sets had they released them) but as far as I am concerned they lost plenty of money during the pre-crash years by waiting so long to release really excellent, in-demand films with more mainstream appeal (their World War II films, the still-unreleased Errol Flynn , Judy Garland, and Esther Williams films, the pre-code films of Jean Harlow, etc) So if Warners ever expected their classic DVDs to sell units comparable to a Transformers or a Harry Potter film then that is just too backward looking. As Kurt Anderson noted in his Sunday New York Times Book Review piece, almost everything is a "niche" these days.

"In a typical week nowadays, fewer than 6 percent of Americans see the most popular scripted series on television. So we have arrived at a strange new historical moment. Literature is just another (minor) sector of the culture industry, but now even the mandarins agree that certain pop artifacts — “The Sopranos,” “The Simpsons,” Radiohead — are cultural creations of the first rank. Meanwhile, popular culture and mass media are no longer very popular or mass. By and large, both entertainment and art appeal to niches, cultural tribes that range in size from tiny to smallish. "


http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/books/review/Andersen-t.html?em

I still believe properly released and marketed classic film DVDs would make money today. My understanding is THE THIN MAN box set did very well for them; I recall it very near the top of the Amazon DVD sales chart - right up there with films released in this decade. So where for example is the still-charming Leslie Caron film LiLi ?- I played my laser disc for my then-little niece years ago, she still fondly recalls the film. Perhaps if Warners mines their inventory to "re-discover" films with some appeal beyond the "niche" instead of endless releases of North By Northwest, Casablanca, The Wizard of Oz, they might still make good profits on their unreleased classics.

 

[Worth]

I don't believe that today's generation is any more or less interested in classic films than any other generation was. Growing up in the late-70s-early-80s, few of my friends showed interest in much of anything beyond "Star Wars", "Ghostbusters" and Indiana Jones.

I think the real problem now is that we live in an age of media overload. I've pretty consistently watched 2-4 films per week since I was a kid in the late-70s. Up until about 1990, I saw everything that I was interested in, and still had time left over to discover films on tv. Now, I only manage to see a fraction of the theatrical releases that I'm interested in, even though I watch about the same number on films. And there's an ever-growing number of films released on video that I've never even heard of.

And that's just the movies. That's not even counting the hundreds of cable television channels, video games and the internet that all vie for attention. If so many new releases - many starring big names and made by filmmakers with substantial reputations - slip through the cracks and go unnoticed, it's hardly surprising that decades-old films aren't getting much attention.

 

[TravisR]

Originally Posted by Worth

I don't believe that today's generation is any more or less interested in classic films than any other generation was.

Same here. It's not like a huge majority of kids in the 1950's were watching silent movies or had some deep interest in German expressionistic films of the 1930's. Most of them just liked modern movies and weren't interested in older movies. And that's the same as today.

 

[Ronald Epstein]

I am not surprised by this news.

I know for a fact that classics have not been selling well.
In fact, one major studio in particular lost a lot of money
on classic sets that practically sold to no-one.

I think these MOD programs such as the Warner Archives
is a great idea for the fact that it is bringing titles to surface
that would never have been released mainstream. I do
realize, however, some of the complaints about the program
including the type of media being used and the problems with
ordering.

 

[Chuck Pennington]

I agree. I just received ...ALL THE MARBLES (1981), a rather obscure catalog title that I thought would never find its way to DVD. And yet here it is in anamorphic widescreen with the original trailer included and in really terrific quality. To say Warner Archive has done some work in upgrading their mastering process for these DVD releases is an understatement. Granted, I can't vouch for the quality of ALL the Warner Archive releases (my recent purchase of THE MOON IS BLUE was only so-so as it featured the same video master as was released in France on DVD, reel change marks and film dirt included and the opening credits slightly clipped at the beginning - but it was progressively-encoded with the trailer), some serious effort must have been taken on the mastering/authoring side for a release of the quality of ...ALL THE MARBLES to find its way to DVD via this program.

 

[Jeff Willis]

Originally Posted by Chuck Pennington

I agree. I just received ...ALL THE MARBLES (1981), a rather obscure catalog title that I thought would never find its way to DVD. And yet here it is in anamorphic widescreen with the original trailer included and in really terrific quality. To say Warner Archive has done some work in upgrading their mastering process for these DVD releases is an understatement. Granted, I can't vouch for the quality of ALL the Warner Archive releases (my recent purchase of THE MOON IS BLUE was only so-so as it featured the same video master as was released in France on DVD, reel change marks and film dirt included and the opening credits slightly clipped at the beginning - but it was progressively-encoded with the trailer), some serious effort must have been taken on the mastering/authoring side for a release of the quality of ...ALL THE MARBLES to find its way to DVD via this program.

Chuck,

Thanks for posting about ...ALL THE MARBLES. I am interested in this one but would have passed without a verified anamorphic release from WB Archives. I've only bought the Barker Tarzan set from the Archive site but this might be another one if I can find a discount coupon or a couple of other titles on my list.

 

[MatthewA]

Originally Posted by TravisR

But in the 1950s, there was no real outlet for access to older movies. TV was in its infancy, home video and the internet were pipe dreams; I don't even know if they had repertory houses then.

 

[Chuck Pennington]

Check out my post with pics here: *** Official Warner Archive DVD Review Thread - Page 7 - Home Theater Forum Community

Originally Posted by Jeff Willis