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Film Studios May Block DVD Rentals For One Month
Ponca City, We love you writes "The LA Times reports that in an effort to push consumers toward buying more movies, some major film studios are considering a new policy that would block DVDs from being offered for rental until several weeks after going on sale. Under the plan, new DVD releases would be available on a purchase-only basis for a few weeks, after which time companies such as Blockbuster and Netflix would be allowed to rent the DVDs to their customers. 'The studios are wrestling with declines in DVD sales while the DVD rental market has been modestly growing,' says Reed Hastings the CEO of Netflix. 'If we can agree on low-enough pricing, delayed rental could potentially increase profits for everyone.' Three studios have already tried to impose a no-rental period of about a month on Redbox, the operator of kiosks that rent movies for $1 per night, believing that Redbox's steeply discounted price undercuts DVD sales. Redbox has responded by suing the studios, seeking to force them to sell it DVDs simultaneously with competitors. Meanwhile, the company is stocking its kiosks with DVDs it can't otherwise obtain by buying them from retailers."
It goes far beyond the green light. I know a guy who's actually sold some scripts to Hollywood studios. The way it works is you start off with a great script (they have a lot to choose from). Then it goes through, literally, five or six rewrites by other writers who've been hired to add profitable elements. No love story? We need that to bring in the high school girls - we'll just shoe-horn one it. Are there enough character elements (aliens, robots, cars, etc) we can use to make cheaply manufactured merchandise? No? Well, we'll change the sidekick from a human to a robot with a simple enough form we can make Happy Meal toys for under $0.50. Are there any elements that might offend anyone in the world (international distribution is key)? We'll just cut those out, or we'll localize them in certain scenes so we can recut for different markets - sex for the Europeans, violence for the Americans. The Japanese get everything.
It's a production line. They're producing a product that's close enough to everything else that's successful they stand a really good chance of making money. The problem is if all the studios are working from the same play book the movies are so similar they won't do very well. And that's exactly what has happened - the production line works so well the market is swamped with product that's only different in the most superficial ways.