Howard Levman wrote:Criterion does a really great job of hunting down important films and bonus materials," says Levman, of Queen Video. But its list is not entirely stable. Many DVDs have gone out of print when Criterion lost the rights. Inevitably, the discontinued films become collectors items and trade on the Internet for hundreds of dollars.
Levman adds that despite Criterion's efforts, the availability of great old movies is limited.
"Only about 80 per cent of all the movies ever made are on DVD," he says. "I have just read that Warner has made 6,600 titles and of those only 1,300 are on DVD. African Queen with Bogart and Hepburn has never been released, Porgy and Bess is not on DVD, and neither is Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole, or Robert Altman's Brewster McCloud, or El Cid."
Naruse & Ozu are hardly barometers with which to sniff the big picture weather of the home video industry. Sure I have specialty releases on vhs too that never came out on dvd yet and may never will.Michael Kerpan wrote:Of the three Naruse films that were once available on video in the US, only one is available on DVD (Woman Ascending -- obviously) -- so far.
And until the Eclipse Ozu box comes out , far less Ozu films have been released on DVD in the US than were released on video ...
It's not just Japanese antiquities -- there's lots of early Hollywood stuff that was available on video that is not yet available on DVD. The fact that places like Blockbuster didn't have these videos on its shelves does not mean they didn't exist. ;~}
So so so many films have been released on dvd which never made it out on vhs. Video vhs stores of yore contained the equivalent of of a mere couple of the dvd walls in any Blockbuster video nowadays. Stores & warehouses can stock two to three more times the number of dvd's versus the vhs's due to smaller size, plus as one factors in the advent of online buy/rent ordering from huge warehouses rotating inventory of the sum of the In Print Industrial Catalog, items have stayed in print longer and the wonderful glut keeps prices low on studio releases.
I thought the great wonderful flood of movies previously unavailable on home vid now available on dvd was universally understood as one of the overarching benefits of dvd... but until anyone can produce a lost ark "DVD SUM" vs "VHS SUM", the discussion is useless. Examples of "XYZ isn't out yet on dvd" vs "yes but CDE is out on DVD & never was on vhs" would devolve into conversational tennis that wouldn't get either of us anywhere. I did believe this was all old industrial news, however.
Netflix alone: This past tuesday, "Netflix Delivers 1 Billionth DVD"