The Future of Home Video

[spectre]

Anyone who (unlike me) knows anything about economics have any idea how all this is likely to affect imports not involving the US (e.g. UK to Australia)?

[Matt]

Hypothetically speaking where would the Criterionforum J6 take place?

Where is the Criterion Closet truck this week?

[dx23]

There's a lot of rumbling with projects that haven't been produced. With this I mean, projects or concepts that are in the primary stages but that the physical item hasn't been made yet. Had a conference call with people from the toy industry, and another call with people that distribute physical media (BDs/4k, vinyl, comic books, trade paperbacks, hardcovers) and the tone was somber as many projects have been put on pause or just outright cancelled. The cost of making some of these products has change substantially to the point that it isn't cost efficient to take it to the finish line anymore. One of the most frustrating ones was a toy line featuring many independent characters like the Tick, Rocketeer, Savage Dragon and Grendel getting completely cancelled as the cost to make each figure is now 3 times what it was before, so the cost became the MSRP, and the company wasn't willing to increase the price of the figures as they would be too much for the customer. Not political here, but Trump has fucked everyone and gone to golf for the weekend.

[hearthesilence]

This was posted on Disc Connected:

***ANNOUNCEMENT***
Overall heads up to the community at large: Today's tariffs will ABSOLUTELY have an effect on the industry. Multiple boutique labels have confirmed manufacturing costs have immediately increased by as much as 20% just today.
*****
@OrbitDVD has shared plans for handling the tariffs as follows:
10% tariff fees for UK and Australian Items
UK and Australian Pre-orders: Orbit DVD will pay for half the tariff fee, the customer will pay for half the tariff fee
After UK and Australian Pre-orders Release: Customer pays all of the tariff fee
Other Countries: Customer pays all of the tariff fee, pre-order or not, whichever percent that may be
Currently In-Stock Imported Items: Remain unaffected until restocked
Currently, pre-orders are closed but will reopen in the following days.
Pre-Orders made before April 2nd will be unaffected. Orbit DVD will pay all of those tariff fees
*****
Please understand that none of these companies are CHOOSING to do this. Prices will inevitably be increasing across the board. This is not meant to do induce FOMO for anyone or any specific products... but if you are in the US and wanting to import releases from overseas, you may want to purchase them directly asap.
This is also a great time to encourage everyone to purchase directly from small boutique labels. In times like this, their future is absolutely in our hands.
We will discuss this more on the show tonight.

[Aunt Peg]

This reminds me of when the Australian Government back in 2017 or 2018 introduced a 10% GST (Goods & Services Tax) on imported items that required overseas companies to charge the GST and then pay the Australian Government.

Overseas businesses that had less than about $70,000 annual sales from Australia were exempt (don't know what the figure is now or if it has been adjusted to inflation - probably not would be my guess).

Amazon cut us off from the 1 July start date but honoured exisiting pre-orders. Eventually they started selling to us again but the prices were much higher.

eBay was included in this too. Even though an Australian may purchase one item from a seller using eBay who barely sold anything to anybody in Australia 10% was added as the Government considered all sellers on eBay as one large entity. However, it doesn't apply to individuals within Australia like myself who may from time to time sell some things on eBay as we are not businesses.

One option people in the US may have is to order directly from companies outside the US is they are able to. Whether the US Government is able to place their new taxes on these remains to be seen, though I was amazed at the number of international businesses that complied with the Australian Government's request to collect GST on their behalf and apparently some other countries adopted this approach as well.

If the cost of physical media increases for me I'll simply cut out the number of films I see at the cinema and wait to view them much more cheaply via a streaming platform a few months later. To be honest I've sort of been thinking of about doing that for a while now and this would give me the financial nudge to do it.

[swo17]

I can handle paying extra for something I really want, but the gross thing about all of this is that with everything you import now, you're basically paying tithing to the Trump administration

[Walter Kurtz]

I didn't know where to post the question but this particular sub-category seems to be a resilient piece of the rapidly shrinking physical media pie. Q: What is the purpose of steelbooks? Are they garage art? To go with beer can collections and Valvoline oil signs? Are they more resilient when a bomb falls on your house? What ever can it be?

[Zot!]

I didn't know where to post the question but this particular sub-category seems to be a resilient piece of the rapidly shrinking physical media pie. Q: What is the purpose of steelbooks? Are they garage art? To go with beer can collections and Valvoline oil signs? Are they more resilient when a bomb falls on your house? What ever can it be?

It's a consoom thing. You'll find your answer if you visit Reddit or Blu-ray.com. In short people collect them, and are willing to re-buy movies to get them. See also slipcovers.
Otherwise I don't mind them, but would never pay a premium for one. I guess the only one I own is the MoC Joan of Arc.

[domino harvey]

Just got an email that Decluttr, my go-to quick source for trading in discs since Amazon stopped accepting them, is closing at the end of the week. Was surprised they lasted this long in this market, but still sad

[JSC]

Yeah, I was bummed out by that since they took blu-rays and dvds regardless of region (unlike EagleSaver, which admittedly
has better buying prices, but only takes region 1 or A). I might try WorldofBooks since they seem to take multi-region discs.

[hearthesilence]

I wish decluttr was better for buyers, but I bought from them about a dozen times - through eBay and Amazon - and I think all but two of those purchases were horrible. They advertised everything they sold as "very good" or "like new" but they usually came in "acceptable" condition, often times scuffed and scratched and even water-logged. It really felt like whoever was in charge of listing their stuff wasn't putting any effort into correctly labeling the condition.

World of Books has been much more reliable, but they have one problem - they mail everything in a plastic bag. tbf, it seems to be a UK based vendor and given the huge spike in shipping charges between the UK and US (and vice versa) directly caused by the Trump administration, I imagine it's the only way they can keep shipping costs down. Books are usually fine but if you get CD's or DVD's from them, I'd make sure to keep some cases on hand just in case.

[hearthesilence]

Speaking of World of Books, I just had an order shipped, and amusingly, even though it landed in JFK Airport, it's now in York, PA.

[dwk]

It appears that Massacre Video has filed for bankruptcy

[Walter Kurtz]

Their creditors will now do a hatchet job on them.

[Grand Wazoo]

It appears that Massacre Video has filed for bankruptcy

Apparently it's fake. Who has the time to do something this stupid.

[dwk]

Yeah, I just saw that instagram post. Who knows, a better question than time, because it only takes a couple of minutes, is why would anyone bother creating a fake bankruptcy document. So dumb.

[FrauBlucher]

NY Times...When Streaming Won't Cut it and you Need the DVD

[pianocrash]

Yeah, I just saw that instagram post. Who knows, a better question than time, because it only takes a couple of minutes, is why would anyone bother creating a fake bankruptcy document. So dumb.

The other forum is rife with ire for Massacre in plenty of odd threads for all sorts of justifiable reasons (some less than not?), but mostly because they seem to never reply to emails? The venn diagram of angry mob to exploitation label has never been slimmer.

[FrauBlucher]

Would you pay $100 for a movie? Criterion and the 'second golden age' of physical media... Make sure to watch the short Becker interview within the article

[colinr0380]

"We've had film clubs formed. We've had people get engaged… although they knew each other before they arrived. Thank goodness."

Just how long do you have to wait in the queue to get in there! It makes me think of that Day Today report about the stuck commuter train!

[FrauBlucher]

Do we really think we are in a “second golden age of physical media”?

[domino harvey]

No, we are in an era where the minority who still supports physical media are being exploited by boutique labels via FOMO-inducing limited editions (priced to the upper limit of what the already shaky market will bear), rereleases packaged in Malibu Stacy’s new hat, and 4K versions of films you already have but now must upgrade yet again because the labels know that the kind of collector who cares about this format is also willing to throw any amount of money at it. All of this while thousands of worthwhile non-genre films languish in vaults as they gradually slip away from cultural consciousness altogether

[TechnicolorAcid]

I won’t deny Domino is correct in his statements but it’s ignoring the fact that a lot of the physical media in the Golden Age (at least to my understanding) was also very genre cinema focused and would also veer into FOMO with their ‘special’ editions. It’s also ignoring the outputs of companies like Criterion, Kino, Radiance and Indicator, who definitely veer into genre cinema but also release a boatload of non-genre cinema too with Eclipse coming back as a fantastic reminder of this fact. Not to mention that there’s a lot of holy grail titles getting released like the Meyer titles and the Golden Princess library plus the steadily increasing interest in physical media acting as an essential revival of this relatively small industry. I wouldn’t say this is a second Golden Age but it feels like it’s at least a Silver Age for physical media.

[tenia]

I remember Wild Side launching in 2010 a French DVD collection of Roman Porno movies.

I also remember the haydays of HK movies on DVD that HK Video and Wild Side ran to its saturation (it's back since a couple of years though), US studios doing 2-DVDs "collector releases" that mostly were more PR fluff thrown on a 2nd disc, horror movies being released all the time only to mostly end up in 1€ bins, and of course DTV movies will Wesley Snipes, Steven Seagal, Jean Claude Van Damme and so on.

For what it's worth, hundreds of additionnal "worthwhile mainstream" movies have been made available since then even if, yes, thousands of 4.0/10 genre movies have also been released within the same time.

I certainly, however, don't think it's a second "golden age", at least not from what this usually implies, which is the vastly massified market DVD created for roughly 5 years (20 years ago). But it is true there is an immense activity on the video market, as this end of year agenda tends to point toward : it's usually a very crowded moment of the year, but I've never seen one like this year's.

[Drucker]

If there was a second golden age, I would argue it was conveniently when I was most into buying films, in 2015-2020. There was just as much great stuff being released then as there is today, just different (though of course, Radiance is a very welcome addition to the fold). But more than the quality of the work, what was great was that there was less of a market of people just trying to buy to collect. I could find deals, man. The pandemic really increased the number of people buying physical media just to collect, and that has made the price and availability of everything more expensive (this is true not just of home video, but perhaps moreso CDs and records). I have also stated elsewhere that 4k has not been a silver bullet for PQ, and people just find more things to complain about.