Your thoughts on movie rights and licencing

[THUNDERSTRUCK]

I'm sure that this has been brought up a million times, so I'll just make it a million and one.

A lot of studios are unwilling to sub-licence their movies to other companies for blu ray release. Why the hell is this?

I know that in the end, it all boils down to money. If a smaller niche company like Scream Factory, Synapse, Scorpion, Arrow, etc. won't cough up the $$ that the big studios want, then they're shit outta luck.

But answer me this: Does an old catalogue film make more money for a studio sitting in limbo, or if the studio sub-licences it for a little less than they had hoped to receive?

Example: What if Scream Factory offered Warner Bros. $250,000 to sub-licence the It's Alive franchise. WB says no, we want $300,000. So the deal falls through.

What has WB gained by torpedoing this deal? That's an extra quarter-million in revenue that they just passed up. Are the It's Alive movies gonna make that much extra money for Warners, only being available on dvd?

I'm no economist, but it would seem like a no-brainer for the big studios to clean out their vaults and make some extra coin on long-forgotten movies that are not available on blu ray or even dvd, for that matter.

Your thoughts?

[BillieCassin]

I think part of it is that by making a release available, they can't unring that bell and later exploit it themselves. If they decide to remake of It's Alive, to use your example, and the originals have already been released - they don't stand to make as much exploiting them at that time. It also helps increase the perceived value of their overall catalog - a library of unreleased titles is seen to have a higher value than films that have been released to bad or mediocre sales.

Now, I don't necessarily agree with any of that (so please don't ask me to "defend" them, LOL, as I don't think these things myself), but I do see how a bean counter probably looks at it. Though I do think this is one reason that the studios are starting to license more to TT - because their capped edition model helps preserve this "value" in the library (since they will never sell more than 3K copies, it doesn't reduce the perceived inherent value of the title in their catalog like an unlimited pressing would).

[GuruAskew]

My thoughts are people on forums like this have an unreasonable sense of entitlement.

If Warner pays millions of dollars to produce a film or to buy the library of another company then it's their property and if they'd rather keep their catalog in-house as opposed to opening the Pandora's Box of letting another company release their property, then I understand.

And even if they aren't worried about other companies tarnishing their image, they're still well within their rights to sit on their content with the intention of possibly releasing it on their own at some later date. If they don't wanna share their profits with a third-party licensee then what are you gonna do?