Movie Studio Finally Sees the Light On Rentals

Griller_GT writes "After months of conducting studies about the effects of delays on sales of DVDs, 'Paramount Pictures has agreed to provide its movies to Redbox on the same day they go on sale.' A Paramount exec said, 'Those people who want to rent are going to figure out ways to rent, and us restricting them from renting isn't going to turn it into a purchase.' Gee, who would have thought of that?" Reader DisKurzion sends in news of another movie business experiment underway by an Australian company called Distracted Media. They are raising funds for a movie called The Tunnel by letting people invest in individual frames for $1 apiece. When the movie is complete, it will be released for free on torrent sites.

Something seems off

[Anon-Admin]

Most movies cost $800,000 + to shoot. At 1$ a frame and 24 frames a sec, a standard 190 min movie only comes out to $273,600. Seems low

Remember, Hollywood movies can cost from $10,000,000 to $100,000,000 to shoot and produce so compared to that it is nothing.

Re:I work for a video rental store

[Anonymous Coward]

What I really hate are the "Rental Exclusive" editions of movies which have long, unskipable previews before the movie.

Posting anonymous so I'm not karma whoring, but there was a LifeHacker article some weeks (months?) ago that said there's a good trick that works for many DVDs and DVD players (granted, not all of them)... to skip all the crap at the beginning of a disk, once it's started, hit STOP-STOP and then PLAY. Many players will start up the main title. I know this has already saved me from many annoying and painful preview crap on discs that we already own.

Re:Redbox is for new releases

[SweeBeeps]

Older movies seem to be a Netflix specialty, especially with streaming content (whereas streaming new content is spotty at best!)

Re:Redbox is for new releases

[mrmeval]

Check their website, you can have movies delivered to a redbox and they'll tell you when you can pick it up.

Re:Something seems off

[iluvcapra]

How much of that cost goes to pay made up positions like "Associate Producers" and others who really contribute nothing to the project?

For the record, APs work their asses off, and usually earn that credit by doing the line producing or post-production supervision, and are themselves usually one promotion over the coffee gofers and runners. It's miserable and unglamorous work and as a technician I have nothing but respect for them.

You might be getting confused between Associate Producers and Executive Producers, but even they sometimes work very hard, or if they don't work on the film they at least are risking millions of dollars of their own money. Everybody's different of course.

Re:I work for a video rental store

[cjHopman]

Those copies at BB are only licensed for private home exhibition (that's why the rental copies cost a lot more and your company pays royalties when you rent them, dipshit). By renting those out you're cheating not just the studio and the distributor, but also the writers, director and actors out of income. My neighbor down the hall is Columbia Pictures Home Ent's Worldwide President, you want me to pass along a URL to your post?

God I hate freeloaders.

Might want to pull out that law book of yours before commenting on legal matters. The right to rent retail purchased DVDs was affirmed in NEBG v Weinstein. Feel free to read more here [firemark.com].

You've now made a fool of yourself to us, please reconsider before doing the same with your neighbor down the hall.

Re:First Rental

[Spellvexit]

I worked at a video store when I was in high school, and every once and a while some customer would lose a copy of their new release. When we finally caught up to them, a month or two down the road, we would inform them that they owed us $90 for the actual video. Sometimes we'd be selling the same movies on our shelves for $35, since we had since bought more to sell to customers at a reasonable price point. The copy *they* lost was the $90 "new release" video, however. The logical arguments that ensued from this disparity were ugly, I tell you!

Re:I work for a video rental store

[naoursla]

Maybe you should tell your neighbor down the hall that he has two options:

1) Sell DVD's
2) Rent movies

If he is going to sell DVD's, then people are going to buy them and rent them out under first sale doctrine. The goal here is that revenue from purchases is more than you can extract from rentals.

Or he could end sales. Plan on all revenue coming from revenue sharing on rentals. Give copies to the rental companies. Charge a super-high purchase rate if people don't return them. Dictate the rental price and take a healthy share. Doing it this way would also allow transfer pricing on companies like Netflix. Columbia could have transfer pricing on the Netflix's digital business if it were not for the escape hatch the physical mailing business provides.

Unfortunately (for him), if the other studio's don't follow his lead, the end result will be fewer movies from Columbia being watched as consumers choose the competition. He could arrange collusion with his competition, but that would be illegal and probably more financially damaging in the long run.

If he wants to discuss real long term solutions to this problem, I am available for consulting.