The online rental and sales outlets I use have good selections, and I do make use of them. However, if I were to examine my rental pattern, I would find that mostly I'm viewing movies I remember seeing in the old days, not seeking out old Bridgette Monet movies I missed (note to self: get to work on that). So a lot of it is nostalgia value for me.

Surely the classics do have value to retailers, or they wouldn't keep being issued, I suppose. Video-X-Pix has been throwing a lot of titles out in recent months, it seems. Somebody must be buying them.

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When I talked to a shop here they basically said they buy $x a month and the distributor sends them any titles they want.

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Guess you´ll have to take a closer look at the large picture, when trying to answer this question.

Commercial value would be the value a storekeeper gives a title, right?
Storekeepers do not intend to show off and/or present large collections of classics nowadays (although I remember times when it appeared to be this way and I absolutely liked these times). Storekeepers want to make profit. Or, to be more precise: As much profit, as possible.

So here is the point where the consumers comes into the scene. What kinda stuff does the average consumer want to rent? As you already guessed, nowadays the newest circus clown acts tend to get 100 times the attention a Golden Age Classics gets. If you take into consideration that retailers price for a brandnew title is often even cheaper (because of the large discounts that come along with the new stuff) than retailers price for a Golden or Silver Age Classic, it´s a simple kind of arithmatic that will answer your question: The commercial value of classics is 100 tomes lower than the commercial value of a brandnew release.

But, than again, it all depends on the consumer, doesn´t it? If you want your rental store to start carry classics, you´ll have to ask for these titles over and over again. There won´t be any guarantee that the storekeeper will follow your request, but on the other hand, the more requests, the more likely it may be.

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Most of the time they're butchered, lousy image quality, some scenes cut :you get the picture.

There is a market for the porn conoisseur but studios don't seem to understand this.

Edited by - joey starr on 7/24/2004 7:38:25 AM

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regarding the subject of an existing market (although rather a niche than a real market, nowadays) I fully agree with you. Hence it could make some sense to re-release classics for those who have the distribution rights for the old material.

But, again, the profit oriented market will most likely not let it happen. First of all, "extras", were to get these from?!? I mean at times when nobody was even thinking of something like DVD, nobody cared to film any extra material. They filmed what they needed for the feature and that was it.

And "quality"?!? Of course it should be possible to perform hi-quality transfers which would lead to top-notch classics, but the price for these kinda transfers is so high that nobody who works for as much profit as possible would even consider to re-release high-quality classics.

Sad, but true.

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-- Snowman

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