Quote:
Originally Posted by noiradelic
It's been three months since the merger. How many titles does one studio normally put OOP in that length of time? Not that many.
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That gets to the heart of my disagreement with the "OOP" philosophy of so much of the discussion.
Small labels who don't own any titles and instead license them from major studios have contractual dates past which they can no longer sell the title. When a small label announces that something is going OOP, it has a very tangible meaning - we will not/can not renew the contract, so we cannot produce any more copies.
For a major studio that outright owns films, they never lose the rights. So any "OOP" is just when a title is selling so slow that they don't have any interest in spending the money to produce another pressing. There are tons and tons of Blu-ray titles from major studios that just have not sold well relative to the amount of discs that was pressed. If they FINALLY run out of stock 10 years after the initial release, that isn't the major studio deciding to "put them OOP"; their slow sales doomed them to that fate a long time ago, and it's just a matter of when the stock finally runs out. It's not like Fox was making a new printing of all these titles every 6 months or so, and now Disney will stop that practice - many of these older titles have likely had literally one pressing ever that hasn't sold out yet.
Take the Fox studio classic line from late 2013 (Call of the Wild, Blood and Sand, Desk Set, Ghost and Mrs. Muir, etc.). Call of the Wild and Blood and Sand sold out before the Disney deal, and Fox did not reprint them. Desk Set is still in stock. Did Fox "keep Desk Set in print"? Or did Desk Set just sell less than Call of the Wild? And if Desk Set sells out within the next year, is that "Disney putting Desk Set OOP"? Or just a function of its 2013-era stock selling out at a later date than Call of the Wild's 2013-era stock? I think A LOT of titles are in this limbo, and none of the speculation about what Disney will/won't "let go OOP" really takes this reality into account, in my opinion.
Even for many of the "reissues" we see (like when WB started handling Paramount titles, and then Paramount later took back control), the "reissues" are, for some titles, the same discs with a new UPC sticker. I've purchased "2017" Paramount BDs that are all beat up because they are actually 2010 discs that were opened/stickered/resealed once in 2014 with the WB UPC and then opened/stickered/resealed again in 2017 with a new Paramount UPC. You think when these FINALLY sell out, Paramount is going to rush to press another batch?
The same is true for the "movie cash" re-releases and various tie-ins (Deadpool photo bomb covers, etc.). They pull unsold stock, open it, add a new UPC sticker and the appropriate movie cash, and reshrinkwrap it. They certainly DO truly repress popular titles that sell well when necessary, but stock moves slower than these different promotional versions might imply.