BDs That Are Out of Print (OOP)

[TheMGR]

The Shout Factory collector's edition of Ninja III: The Domination appears to be back in print and available again from their website.

Oddly the earlier edition with the older scan and fewer extras is also available again but at a higher price than the collector's edition.

[Hellhound]

This is OOP:

[HD Goofnut]

Originally Posted by Hellhound

[Show spoiler]This is OOP:

Done.

[CrowKiller]

Originally Posted by TripleHBK

I don't sell movies, but that sure is tempting. It's been over a decade since I watched my copy and I had a real hard time enjoying it last time I watched it.

You got to shake that "I gotta keep it because it's OOP". I used to be like that. For me it's easier to realize that if I'm never going to watch it again or doesn't have some sentimental value, then it's not worth taking up space. Plus, if it's high dollar, and you sell it, it's more money for movies you'd want and enjoy more. That's the way I see it anyway.

[kenbenobi]

Originally Posted by CelestialAgent

Currently listed on Amazon for $104!

Originally Posted by TripleHBK

I don't sell movies, but that sure is tempting. It's been over a decade since I watched my copy and I had a real hard time enjoying it last time I watched it.

I saw this post and said YIPPEE, I'm gonna sell mine (and I don't normally sell movies either). But alas, I discovered I only own the DVD, not the BD.

My collection is way too large (over 7000 physical discs). I decided that unless it's a title I absolutely love, I'll sell a few OOP titles which are going for a lot. I've only done it once before (The Criterion Man Who Fell to Earth, which I then rebought when it got a new release).

[waxHead]

I didn't see any of the Drafthouse Films releases listed on the main page. Quite a few are OOP now, including:

A Field In England
The Act of Killing
The Look of Silence
Ms. 45
The Visitor
Why Don't You Play in Hell? (Jigoku de naze warui)

[Vincent Dawn]

AGFA tweeted Scary Movie (1991) is going Out of Print.

[kemcha]

Chain Reaction (Keanu Reeves) is another Blu-ray that remains out of print. It just boggles my mind that these studios have all of these movies that customers want to purchase and yet they remain out of print. That doesn't even count all of those movies and TV shows that remain unreleased in any format, that have never been released.

[James Luckard]

Originally Posted by kemcha

Chain Reaction (Keanu Reeves) is another Blu-ray that remains out of print. It just boggles my mind that these studios have all of these movies that customers want to purchase and yet they remain out of print. That doesn't even count all of those movies and TV shows that remain unreleased in any format, that have never been released.

That's a Fox title. Pretty much the entire Fox catalog went OOP when Disney bought them.

[SGFfilmfan]

Originally Posted by kemcha

Chain Reaction (Keanu Reeves) is another Blu-ray that remains out of print. It just boggles my mind that these studios have all of these movies that customers want to purchase and yet they remain out of print. That doesn't even count all of those movies and TV shows that remain unreleased in any format, that have never been released.

Not sure if you need it, but here it is
https://vintagestock.com/store/produ...in-reaction-br

[HD Goofnut]

Updates made.

[kemcha]

Originally Posted by James Luckard

That's a Fox title. Pretty much the entire Fox catalog went OOP when Disney bought them.

That may be; however, Chain Reaction was long out of print for several years, even before Disney was floating the idea of buying out Fox Studio's library catalog of titles.

[neo_reloaded]

Haha, never change you "All Fox titles are OOP!" people. I'm constantly seeing new Disney-era pressings of titles - both from online stores and in physical brick-and-mortar stores. The fact that Fox had near-exclusively used the IFPI 2F29 USA-based replicator whereas Disney has near-exclusively used Technicolor Mexico makes it trivial to spot which discs are pre- or post-Disney-buyout. I specifically flip over Fox titles whenever I'm in Best Buy/Target/Walmart to see which have the "Disc Made In Mexico" stamping on the back cover.

Yeah lots of older stuff is OOP, but most was already like that under Fox's sole control, and Disney, Lionsgate, Warner, Sony, etc. all have tons of OOP discs too. Nothing special happened with the Fox buyout, there was no mass OOPing.

I particularly liked the convo a few pages back where people were bemoaning the supposedly coming OOP status of a Marilyn Monroe title because it's Fox, because that's too risky for Disney's brand etc., and then someone noticed that Disney is selling that Blu-ray via its own Disney Movie Club site.

[James Luckard]

Originally Posted by neo_reloaded

Haha, never change you "All Fox titles are OOP!" people. I'm constantly seeing new Disney-era pressings of titles - both from online stores and in physical brick-and-mortar stores. The fact that Fox had near-exclusively used the IFPI 2F29 USA-based replicator whereas Disney has near-exclusively used Technicolor Mexico makes it trivial to spot which discs are pre- or post-Disney-buyout. I specifically flip over Fox titles whenever I'm in Best Buy/Target/Walmart to see which have the "Disc Made In Mexico" stamping on the back cover.

Yeah lots of older stuff is OOP, but most was already like that under Fox's sole control, and Disney, Lionsgate, Warner, Sony, etc. all have tons of OOP discs too. Nothing special happened with the Fox buyout, there was no mass OOPing.

I particularly liked the convo a few pages back where people were bemoaning the supposedly coming OOP status of a Marilyn Monroe title because it's Fox, because that's too risky for Disney's brand etc., and then someone noticed that Disney is selling that Blu-ray via its own Disney Movie Club site.

I'm not saying all Fox titles are OOP forever. Certainly some of the biggest ones have remained readily available this entire time.

However, many have been OOS for months, and it seems unlikely most of them will ever return via Disney.

If you want to believe that masses of Fox titles didn't vanish soon after the Disney sale, that's just contradicting reality.

Good luck trying to find new copies of any of these titles directly through most major retailers:

28 Days Later
28 Weeks Later
Australia
A Bigger Splash
Cast Away
Cleopatra
The Counselor
The Devil Wears Prada
Entrapment
Ever After
From Hell
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir
In Time
Jackie
Joy Ride
The Last King of Scotland
Master and Commander
My Cousin Rachel
Never Let Me Go
Niagara
Once
One Fine Day
The Poseidon Adventure
Romeo + Juliet
The Seven Year Itch
Shallow Hal
Shame
Sleeping with the Enemy
Slumdog Millionaire
Sunshine
That Thing You Do
Tigerland
Titanic (1953)
The Towering Inferno
Working Girl

Ad Astra UHD
Eddie the Eagle UHD
Exodus: Gods and Kings UHD
Murder on the Orient Express UHD
The Post UHD
Prometheus UHD
Widows UHD

To be clear, those are just the Fox titles from my own collection that Amazon doesn't stock new, and hasn't stocked new in many months. It's about 3/4 of the Fox titles I own.

And no, these were not gradually vanishing here and there, they were pretty much all readily available until the Disney boyout, when they all quickly started vanishing. And this started long before COVID hit, though I'm sure that has only exacerbated things.

I find it hard to believe that there was not an edict from Disney, once they took over, to stop pressing new discs of most Fox catalog titles, once the existing stock ran out. Sometimes that took a month, sometimes a year, but these are all titles that Fox had kept in print for some time.

Yes, other studios have allowed a lot of their deep catalog titles to go OOP, especially Warners, but it wasn't as abrupt as the Fox culling, and it hasn't included so many recent titles, like all the Fox UHD titles that suddenly dried up. I defy anyone to find any other studio that has so many UHD titles that vanished almost overnight.

It's a gamble at this point for any particular Fox title. Disney may find some old stock and send it to retailers, or post it on their membership site, but if anyone thinks Disney is really going to start pressing new copies of every one of these titles, I have a bridge to sell them.

[neo_reloaded]

Most of the BD titles you list are very old, and I could easily, easily, make similar lists for Sony, Warner Bros., Lionsgate, etc. And most of those 4K UHDs are for films that either underperformed or don't fit the usual 4K UHD criteria and thus were lucky to receive a 4K UHD release at all. A few are more popular and I do expect to see represses - Murder on the Orient Express when its sequel comes out, and Prometheus the next time anything Alien is released.

The idea that a whole library is intentionally going OOP overnight in an observable way does not remotely match how long it takes for major studio pressings to sell out. Many, many titles are still running on years-old pressings (decade-old in a significant number of cases, even). If Fox last pressed something in 2012, and that stock FINALLY runs out in 2020, they have no motivation to repress. It's not like Fox was regularly pressing new batches of those films in 2017, 2018, 2019, etc., and then in 2020 Disney said "Wooooah let's cut all that out!" Seriously - I've commented on this before but no one has seemed to care - you can easily observe how insanely OLD a lot of stock is by how many times it has been reshrinkwrapped with a new UPC sticker for different promotions or distributor changes over the years. Paramount titles rebranded to WB with a sticker and then rebranded back to Paramount. Deadpool 2 tie-in slipcovers placed over late 2000's pressings of ancient titles, with telltale signs like those differently styled Viva Elite cases that they don't even manufacture anymore.

And if a bunch of ancient titles FINALLY ran out in the last year, I would wager a significant factor in that is how this forum and others have been nonstop, breathlessly worrying about Fox titles since 2019, and that drives people to panic buy. Every time any Fox title is mentioned, in this OOP thread but also in every other random thread, someone chimes in about how all Fox titles are going OOP and you better buy fast.

Now for a few anecdotes...

While I'm not in the mood to go waste an hour+ investigating every title mentioned, one jumped out at me - Master & Commander. Yes that appeared OOP last year - but guess what, it's in stock now pretty much everywhere I checked, and I know it has a new Disney-era pressing because I ordered it not too long ago and received a fresh Technicolor Mexico-pressed disc.

As for The Post 4K UHD, I recall you've mentioned this one multiple times in the past and I had previously looked into it. It's still available from Best Buy and Walmart, among others; and Walmart typically fulfills disc orders by having them shipped directly from the distributor, so that would suggest that the distributor of this title still has it in stock. I don't see it from Amazon, but they are not the end-all be-all.

edit: Ad Astra 4K UHD and Prometheus 4K UHD also are in stock from Best Buy and Walmart (and thus the distributor). Not sure if you saw these OOS earlier and they've since been repressed, or if you're just going by Amazon. I honestly expect I'd find some of the titles in the BD list in stock from the distributor if I searched as well - again, Amazon is not the end-all be-all. They co-mingle their own stock with third-party FBA stock, and that changes their calculus on what to reorder for their own stock - and they just observably sometimes choose not to restock items that are still available from the distributor.

[James Luckard]

I'm in the habit of routinely checking random discs, to see if they're available, and how much they're going for. Most of these vanished from Amazon not long after the sale to Disney.

Yes, some have reappeared, I'm not claiming that every Fox title is gone forever into the Disney Vault, never to have a physical media edition again. I'm simply saying that, in these waning years of physical media, collectors would be wise to buy certain titles if they want them, as they may never reappear.

A perfect example is LAURA. It was OOP or OOS for many months, probably about two years, yet it's back now. Will TITANIC 1953, for example, do the same? Anything is possible, but I wouldn't bet on it.

I've pointed out again and again that I don't think an entire library went OOP overnight, I think it was more subtle than that. I think there was a conscious choice by Disney not to repress Fox titles when they dried up after the studio was sold.

Yes, other studios have OOP titles, but there isn't another studio out there where over 3/4 of the titles I own from them are either OOP or OOS at Amazon.

And, yes, I use Amazon because it's easiest to check, but also because I've learned from experience that it's usually the first place to run out of something, and that other places take longer, but eventually do, most times.

At this point, our circular argument is like an atheist and an evangelical trying to convince each other, and probably as much fun for everyone else.

But when a certain Fox title is tough to find, for months on end, I still maintain there's a very simple reason for that.

[neo_reloaded]

Originally Posted by James Luckard

I'm simply saying that, in these waning years of physical media, collectors would be wise to buy certain titles if they want them, as they may never reappear.

I don't disagree with this. But you (and many others on this forum) are conflating this general truth with a Fox-specific narrative, and the Fox-specific narrative part is unsubstantiated. That narrative was started before the buyout was even finalized when there inherently could not yet exist any evidence, and that narrative is still unsubstantiated among multiple axes of interrogation.

From a practical, number-based perspective: Studios aren't making month-to-month or even year-to-year decisions about which titles are going to go OOP because it takes many years (easily 5 to 10 in many cases) for a pressing to even sell out in many cases, so there isn't even the opportunity for such decisions to be made.

From an ideological perspective: Why would Disney treat the Fox catalog so differently from its own? It hasn't drastically culled its own catalog, so why would it drastically cull Fox's?

From an anecdotal perspective: I have found many Disney-era represses of Fox titles (I just saw a '20th Century Studios'-branded reissue of the 4-film Omen collection in a physical Walmart today, for instance), and many of the titles you listed as OOP are in fact still available from the distributor.

Perhaps you are right that this is an atheist v. evangelical situation, but I'm going to keep providing my atheist perspective so long as all you evangelicals are constantly bringing up "Fox = OOP" every other day.

[James Luckard]

Originally Posted by neo_reloaded

I don't disagree with this. But you (and many others on this forum) are conflating this general truth with a Fox-specific narrative, and the Fox-specific narrative part is unsubstantiated. That narrative was started before the buyout was even finalized when there inherently could not yet exist any evidence, and that narrative is still unsubstantiated among multiple axes of interrogation.

From a practical, number-based perspective: Studios aren't making month-to-month or even year-to-year decisions about which titles are going to go OOP because it takes many years (easily 5 to 10 in many cases) for a pressing to even sell out in many cases, so there isn't even the opportunity for such decisions to be made.

Again though, the decision I think Disney made is a passive one. I believe, based on the way titles ceased to be available, that when Fox Home Video was dissolved, and Disney took over, they made a conscious decision simply not to repress most Fox titles whenever they sold out their existing stock.

Some vanished almost immediately, some took months, but I still contend that was just existing stock vanishing.

Originally Posted by neo_reloaded

From an ideological perspective: Why would Disney treat the Fox catalog so differently from its own? It hasn't drastically culled its own catalog, so why would it drastically cull Fox's?

Simple reason. Fox has a MUCH larger catalog and they had released a MUCH larger portion of that vast catalog onto BD. Disney's BD output, especially of its live-action catalog titles, was small, and much of that was licensed anyway. Fox really released a LOT of titles, and kept them in print for quite a while. It makes perfect sense that Disney wouldn't see the same value in keeping a vast line of catalog titles and recent titles on the market, since they didn't have an internal habit of doing that.

Originally Posted by neo_reloaded

From an anecdotal perspective: I have found many Disney-era represses of Fox titles (I just saw a '20th Century Studios'-branded reissue of the 4-film Omen collection in a physical Walmart today, for instance), and many of the titles you listed as OOP are in fact still available from the distributor.

I'm sure some old Fox titles will reappear, I don't think there was an iron-clad mandate that all Fox titles would instantly and permanently be banned from physical media. I just think Disney will only focus on a few key titles, as they see fit.

I don't think Disney will ever re-press the entire Fox BD/UHD catalog, as it was when the studio was sold. And, yes, some titles do eventually vanish, but a majority of a studio's entire catalog vanishing within a year, when many of us predicted that would happen, is worth noting.

Originally Posted by neo_reloaded

Perhaps you are right that this is an atheist v. evangelical situation, but I'm going to keep providing my atheist perspective so long as all you evangelicals are constantly bringing up "Fox = OOP" every other day.

And here I thought I was the atheist.

[ShellBeacher]

You guys need a glass chessboard.

X-Men (2000) - Ending Scene - YouTube

[Jay H.]

Originally Posted by kemcha

Chain Reaction (Keanu Reeves) is another Blu-ray that remains out of print. It just boggles my mind that these studios have all of these movies that customers want to purchase and yet they remain out of print.

Honestly, do you know many people who want to buy Chain Reaction?