If there’s an award for the biggest A-hole studio, it should go to Fox. The folks over there always try to mess with the filmmaker’s vision on their movies, not to mention it receives a good chunk of money off of WATCHMEN’s profit without doing jacksh*t, thanks to court decision.
Via slashfilm, to make matters worse, according to videobusiness.com, Fox will start removing special features from its rental DVDs. So basically the intention is to come up with 2 versions of discs for each of Fox movies.. “premium versions with added-value material such as digital copy for the sell-through market and stripped-down offerings for rental” in hopes that with this strategy, people will buy DVDs instead of renting them and Fox DVD sales can jump drastically in places like Wal-Mart.
So the next time you go to your local video store and rent upcoming Fox movies like Marley & Me and Slumdog Millionaire (which will hit the shelves on March 31st), you won’t get within the packet any type of behind-the-scenes featurette, bloopers, or director’s commentary, none, kaput!
The same will happen to DVDs for The Day the Earth Stood Still, due in stores April 7 (prebook March 11); The Wrestler and Notorious on April 21 (prebook March 25); and Bride Wars, April 28 (prebook April 1).
Many people aren’t happy about this one including yours truly. The article has an example of Seattle’s Scarecrow Video, the owners already planning to creatively get around Fox’s rules worried about annoying customers, who might wrongly assume they’ll get bonus features with the rental Slumdog and Wrestler standard DVDs.
“Can you imagine explaining this to all of your customers?” Scarecrow buyer Mark Steiner asked. “People will think when they rent, it should have everything on it. And why shouldn’t it? This is just silly, and consumers aren’t going to be happy.”
What the store is planning to do is bring in rental DVD copies from its distributor and go to another store to buy at least one of the bonus-filled sell-through DVD versions, which it will keep on the shelf for rental.
As for me, I am already planning on buying Slumdog Millionaire because that’s worthy of collecting and I’m curious to see more about how they made the movie especially the cinematography aspect of it all.
But I sympathize for Joe who owns the local mom-and-pop video store in my area that I often go to. I wonder what his strategy’s going to be in response to this awful move by Fox.
But then again, aren’t most people today watching their movies online or via Netflix? By the way, will Fox’s decision affect Netflix as well? Because that would be an outrage.
