Is Twilight Time Making A Comeback?

Via Screen Archives:

"December 15th - Screen Archives Entertainment is very grateful to Twilight Time co-founders Brian Jamieson and the late Nick Redman for allowing us to continue the Twilight Time brand with two new selections to be announced soon. Mike Finnegan and others who help Brian and Nick produce the Twilight Time blu-rays were a first-rate team. We have been fortunate to secure Mike's services to ensure we match the earlier titles quality. We have changed the final package only slightly, as many of you will recognize the outstanding graphics of designer Jim Titus. We have additional titles in various stages of production now, and hope to accelerate our release schedule in the future. Even though we started with the last release under Brian and Nick, the lead time for the production of each blu-ray is several months, made even slower under COVID. There are many complexities involved in acquiring the materials, licensing, checks, double-checks, and rechecks regarding quality before authoring and compression. And captioning. Finally, we had to find a provider to press the discs and print in the quantity that we are licensed to produce. Many of you have suggested titles, so feel free to send any suggestions, ideas, or comments to [email protected] We won't respond to every message, but it will be useful to hear from you."

December 16th - Twilight Time is back with two new titles for pre-order! THE MAN FROM HONG KONG (AKA THE DRAGON FLIES / 1975) and VENOM (AKA THE LEGEND OF SPIDER FOREST / 1971). The estimated street date is Monday, January 18th.

It's being discussed here.

Thanks for the info.

Yes, I received the e-mail from SAE yesterday. Not too excited for the first two titles announced, but it'll be interesting to see what their future releases are.

It sounds like it is "in name only".

No clues as to whether quality control will be maintained at all.

I loved the films TT released, so I'm hopeful for the future titles. Thanks for the info.

No sales this time if they wanna survive

willyTass said:

No sales this time if they wanna survive

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Yes, I think that's what really undermined the Twilight Time business model. So many prospective purchasers of discs now have a firm policy of waiting for sales that letting it be known that sooner or later it will be possible to buy this or that disc at 50% discount is commercial suicide.

I think that’s true to a certain extent but I also think they were in a no-win situation. Between the brief period that passed from when the label started to when they started engaging in frequent sales, the marketplace had changed so dramatically and the consumer didn’t value the discs as highly as they once did. $35 a movie (price of disc plus rough shipping estimate) was a difficult ask in a time when the other boutique labels inspired by TT were charging half that on release date and discounting even further on sales. I think it’s unfortunate but I’m not really sure there was much they could have done differently. There’s a limited number of us enthusiasts and most of us have limits in our budgets and there has been a lot of competition for our eyeballs and wallets lately.

Josh Steinberg said:

I think that’s true to a certain extent but I also think they were in a no-win situation.

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Agreed. I would buy movies that I 'had' to have out of fear of a sellout or just to support Twilight Time but the bulk of the titles that I bought when they were on sale, there's no way that I would have ever paid $35 for. I assume that many people did the same so I guess it becomes a question of what's a better financial move- having sales that teach the customers to wait to buy but also move more units for less money or not having a sale and not selling as many discs? Considering there was frequent sales, I think selling the discs for less money must have made more financial sense for them but it does seem like a bad precedent to set.

I‘ll tell You one thing, and I’m not ashamed to say it, that I never waited for a Twilight Time sale

if it was a movie I wanted I always ordered it on release date as a way of saying thank you to them and encouraging film preservation

i laugh when I read at BluRay.com ”film lovers“ quibbling about having to pay $29 for a movie. Film lovers my ass.

willyTass said:

I‘ll tell You one thing, and I’m not ashamed to say it, that I never waited for a Twilight Time sale

if it was a movie I wanted I always ordered it on release date as a way of saying thank you to them and encouraging film preservation

i laugh when I read at BluRay.com ”film lovers“ quibbling about having to pay $29 for a movie. Film lovers my ass.

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(More generally).

In practice, I've found that if I am not willing to pay first-day/week prices for a particular title on bluray (or dvd), then there is a very high probability that it will be a title which I end up only watching once or twice (or never).

For just about every title where I am not willing to pay the first-day/week prices, I'll just wait until they show up on a basic cable channel in two or three years. Frequently this will confirm that most of these titles are ones which I only watch once or twice.

willyTass said:

I‘ll tell You one thing, and I’m not ashamed to say it, that I never waited for a Twilight Time sale

if it was a movie I wanted I always ordered it on release date as a way of saying thank you to them and encouraging film preservation

i laugh when I read at BluRay.com ”film lovers“ quibbling about having to pay $29 for a movie. Film lovers my ass.

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Just to reiterate, I purchased plenty of movies from them on release day for the same reasons that you did but there's some titles that I just didn't have the interest in to spend $35 on. I don't think that makes me any less of a film lover than it makes me a guy that doesn't like Peyton Place enough to have spent $35 on it.

I know I know . I was referencing the “siege mentality “ crowd who wait for a disc to hit $9 bucks

willyTass said:

I‘ll tell You one thing, and I’m not ashamed to say it, that I never waited for a Twilight Time sale. if it was a movie I wanted I always ordered it on release date as a way of saying thank you to them and encouraging film preservation. i laugh when I read at BluRay.com ”film lovers“ quibbling about having to pay $29 for a movie. Film lovers my ass.

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Absolutely! If I really want a title, the cost is almost irrelevant. I recently purchased a blu ray from Germany. The blu ray was 23 U.S. dollars and the shipping was about $23 U.S. dollars. That's $46 for one blu ray! But it was a "limited" title that I've always wanted with zip chance of getting a U.S. release. I'm not about to quibble about costs.

I feel the same way, Kino releases tons of movies, and have lots of sales. If I want a movie, Im grabbing it day 1 ; I'm not waiting around for a sale

TT released quite a few titles that were quite obscure, further narrowing their possible available customer base.

Nearly every TT title I purchased (100+) was a blind buy, as I'd never seen or even heard of the majority of their titles. While I'm comfortable with a blind buy around $15, I wasn't willing to go $30 each for blind buys. But their sales convinced me to pull the trigger on many titles I would have passed on at $30 each.

Not sure if that helped the bottom line or not in the end, but it expanded their potential sales base outside of dedicated cinephiles.

That they licensed the right to make specifically 3000 copies and that the licensing deals were valued based on selling that number of copies at full price probably didn’t help matters in the end. I doubt Kino, for instance, is making more than 500 or 1000 of many of the titles they’re issuing. For TT, being locked into a model where they’re paying for stuff they can’t sell, while at the same time not being able to make more of what was selling, probably wasn’t helpful in the end. The licensing part of the business changed so much between when they started and when they wound down, and I don’t think their model allowed them to be as nimble as they might otherwise have been. But at the same time, Nick and Brian were always up front about it being a business with a shelf life and were passionate specifically about releasing titles that were meaningful to them, so I don’t think money was the driving factor to what they were trying to do in the first place. In the end, Nick spent the last years of his life on a passion project to make films that were personally meaningful to him available to an audience that would appreciate them, and when you step back and look at what he was trying to do and what his expectations were, I think it was quite an accomplishment.

I did ask them a question about re-releasing previous titles and i got a response saying "Unfortunately, there will be no re-issues happening. Only new titles moving forward". I hope they will release some good titles.

I always paid full price for titles I really cared about (sometimes TWO copies), ones like The Egyptian, Exodus, The President's Lady, Khartoum, Demetrius and the Gladiators, Anastasia and Alexander the Great. Sadly, these were overshadowed by the big sales for 70's-90's horror and exploitation stuff so beloved by the under 60 set. If TT still has the Fox connection, I'd pay anything for titles like The Story of Ruth, Esther and the King, Francis of Assisi, Prince of Players or others of that era. Otherwise no interest here. Dragon Flies or Venom just ain't my thing.