Third Window Films Discussion Thread

[thenexus6]

Interestingly on Twitter Ben was saying about them being top preorders on Amazon at £30 and was directing people to Terracotta.

I wonder after Amazon take all their cuts how close does Adam make compared to the £18 price on Terra.

[Cinematt]

Originally Posted by thenexus6

Interestingly on Twitter Ben was saying about them being top preorders on Amazon at £30 and was directing people to Terracotta.

I wonder after Amazon take all their cuts how close does Adam make compared to the £18 price on Terra.

He's definitely said he gets more out of selling on Terracotta at a lower price, and amazon is the lowest return, which is presumably why they've been getting the best pre-order prices on everything, particularly the box sets. You realistically can't not sell on amazon but driving people to where you get the best return is obviously sensible.

[NormanicGrav]

To be honest, when it comes to Third Window releases I just stick exclusively through Terracotta.

I've got all three Director's Company Editions ordered together (though it does mean I'll be waiting a while) and the Terracotta pre-order prices are much better than other retailers in a lot of cases for TWF's line-up, even 88 Films titles are priced well (Eureka depends but Eureka's bundles does beat them by a few pounds).

There is of course you need £25 or more to get free shipping but with the amount of Asian films released each month, I often bundle two items together to make up for it - like GO and Burning Paradise back in May. Plus if you've ordered enough, you get points though at a lower pace compared to 88's store. The fact that they've added Radiance Films titles is a nice inclusion.

Also the amount of protection to the sets is pretty good considering Amazon is hit or miss (heck Arrow's own shipping is well very hit or miss from what I've seen).

TL;DR I recommend Terracotta for your Asian Cinema shopping whenever possible.

[roguejp]

Yeah, but it's different for us non-UK residents.

For example, if I order the 3 Directors Company titles, the shipping to the Netherlands is 'Standard International (Untracked 7 - 21 days, Royal Mail)' for £7.85 GBP or 'Send it Tracked' (which I have to do these days with the not-so-good postal service here) for £11.50 GBP. So that's adding about £3,85 per title.

[roguejp]

I finished the movies and most of the special feautures in the Ishii box yesterday.
The second disc with Party 7 is excellent as expected. As with Sharkskin Man, it's been many years since I saw Party 7 and it still holds up. The humor, the funny dialogue, the twists, the 'coolness'; it's all still there. Nice extra's too, although I didn't have time for the audio commentary.

I'll be honest about the third disc with the 3 movies Sorasoi, Hello Junichi and Norioka Workshop: the first two movies just weren't for me.

Sorasoi just had a boring story and it's jumps around a lot storywise. If I'm correct Ishii only co-directed it and maybe that's the reason that the movie just couldn't keep my attention.

Hello Junichi is slighty better but suffers from a different problem. For a movie that focuses on kids, you would hope for better actors for the kids. Sadly that's not the case and it really distracted me from the movie. That being said, Hikari Mitsushima and Tatsuya Gashûin are excellent and almost saved the movie.

Norioka Workshop is a short (30 minutes) and was a fun watch with nice plottwists.

Although two movies on the last disc didn't work for me, I would still wholeheartedly recommend the box. Sharkskin Man and Party 7 are a must-see. Promise of August (Ishii's first!) and Norioka Workshop are interesting movies which I'm glad I saw. The box itself is a work of art, all the transfers are very nice and there are great special features. And, limited to 2000 copies....

[Jigvell]

I just finished GO.
I knew about this film back in the day when I was watching the early 2000's japanese cinema. For some reason it didn't appeal to me, I skipped it and never came back to it.
It's very good film and I would recommend it to anyone who likes these "aimless youth" stories (like Blue Spring or Destruction Babies, although not so dark).

[Cinematt]

Guard from Underground has dropped to £19.99 at amazon, the other Director's Company titles don't seem to have shifted yet.

[logboy]

Originally Posted by Cinematt

Guard from Underground has dropped to £19.99 at amazon, the other Director's Company titles don't seem to have shifted yet.

i still think £20 is ... off.

i think everything is getting / has gotten too expensive. in general. largely. overall.

i baulked when radiance appeared and started with with £17-£18 ish.

indicator did that too. even they've accepted £10 at amazon has to happen, it seems.

the broken record in my head says this is now not a film interest for regular buyers, as much as it's a collecting interest ... or habit.

can we get back to films? forget the limited editions and lavish this or that.

we're further and further away from that with each passing year with physical media, i think.

[Cinematt]

On the end of year round up they did on the podcast last year Adam specifically said he’d tried to keep prices down with less fancy editions of things like not putting a slip on Crazy Thunder Road because that keeps a quid or two off the rrp, and they didn’t sell as well. The market rewards limited editions with sales because people prioritise them, and if there's nothing limited about them people just wait for sales. Given how relatively niche TWF movies are we’re lucky to get most of them at all (there are so many that don’t have another English friendly release anywhere in the world) so they have to do what it takes to make them profitable. If you wait long enough you can get the standard edition in a sale however many months or years down the line, but really £20 isn’t crazy money to own a film or two that would otherwise be impossible to see.

[jonboy24]

At the end of the day £20 is a fair price.

I remember the days when I purchased Tartan asia extreme dvds for £20 about 20 years ago.

[logboy]

Originally Posted by Cinematt

The market rewards limited editions with sales because people prioritise them, and if there's nothing limited about them people just wait for sales.

the market is now a spiral if labels and buyers making things increasingly reliant upon gimmicks. mostly overpriced cardboard. sometimes false or contrived scarcity too.

[Faustus]

Originally Posted by logboy

can we get back to films? forget the limited editions and lavish this or that.

we're further and further away from that with each passing year with physical media, i think.

I agree. If a film is good, it should be able to sell on its own merits. It's crazy to me that so many people prioritise cardboard over disc content.

[thirdwindowfilms]

Originally Posted by logboy

i still think £20 is ... off.

i think everything is getting / has gotten too expensive. in general. largely. overall.

i baulked when radiance appeared and started with with £17-£18 ish.

indicator did that too. even they've accepted £10 at amazon has to happen, it seems.

the broken record in my head says this is now not a film interest for regular buyers, as much as it's a collecting interest ... or habit.

can we get back to films? forget the limited editions and lavish this or that.

we're further and further away from that with each passing year with physical media, i think.

just to chime in, but you do realise that with the pandemic, Ukraine war, Brexit, heavy inflation and other factors, that it costs a lot more to manufacture discs than it used to? You might have read the news about various materials have gone up in price due to these factors. Well, physical media is the same.
And since major companies are pressing less than before, the overheads of the few pressing plants like Sony, Technicolor, etc have gone up, and those costs are put onto the smaller companies.
Just taking a look at some of my manufacturing invoices with Sony from 2018, the costs I'm paying now are at least 1.5 and in some cases double what I was paying then.
And companies like Amazon, Zavvi, etc are taking larger margins and being more cutthroat than ever.
Yet, the cost to acquire rights hasn't really changed.

So if £18 is a lot, then just wait for it to go into a sale or buy it digitally. You can rent/own digitally for a lot less than that.

It costs between £10-17 to watch a movie in the cinema once
and only a few more £ to own it forever (and with lots of bonus material)

Or you can pay much less to rent it digitally.

[logboy]

Originally Posted by thirdwindowfilms

just to chime in, but you do realise that with the pandemic, Ukraine war, Brexit, heavy inflation and other factors, that it costs a lot more to manufacture discs than it used to? You might have read the news about various materials have gone up in price due to these factors. Well, physical media is the same.
And since major companies are pressing less than before, the overheads of the few pressing plants like Sony, Technicolor, etc have gone up, and those costs are put onto the smaller companies.
Just taking a look at some of my manufacturing invoices with Sony from 2018, the costs I'm paying now are at least 1.5 and in some cases double what I was paying then.
And companies like Amazon, Zavvi, etc are taking larger margins and being more cutthroat than ever.
Yet, the cost to acquire rights hasn't really changed.

So if £18 is a lot, then just wait for it to go into a sale or buy it digitally. You can rent/own digitally for a lot less than that.

It costs between £10-17 to watch a movie in the cinema once
and only a few more £ to own it forever (and with lots of bonus material)

Or you can pay much less to rent it digitally.

i appreciate the open and detailed explanation of the factors impacting prices. your honesty and openness has long been a great example to other labels.

however, generally, across labels both here in the UK and in the USA, the issues i am attempting to describe that have seen an apparent abandonment of a wider audience for physical media, the shift towards it primarily as a collectable is a cultural phenomenon that predates the cost of living crisis.

here in the UK, TWF was £8.99 all those years ago in the DVD-dominant days, and stood pretty much alone iirc, for a while, in undercutting the general price point of the market. 88 films were, in the earlier BD days, also managing that kind of price. i'm sure there are other examples that others can add.

the only thing i can see that's most obviously added to their (88 films) product to compensate for the increase in price is slipcases, posters ... without a breakdown on the inside, i think seeing barebones editions with price rises would feel more genuine to the layman than both price rises and gimmicks appearing alongside each other and the only things that appear highlighted during promotion or discussions / explanations that i've seen. the percentage of the price increase doesn't appear to reflect the cost of artworks or cardboard, either.

there's a shift to coloured cases, extra cardboard , numbered editions, all appearing far more frequently in places that were once relatively bare-bones and affordable.

it's precisely at the time when life in general is more expensive that the things within it don't need to be looking for manipulations to add to the actual cause of genuine increases in price.

TWF isn't the bad boy here, far from it - it's a great label, predominantly handled impressively over many years - but the new sub-range and the apparent upward shift in price seems like a 'moment' that feels firmly as though it's the wrong direction on the pricing.

i'm in for 'typhoon club', but; i'm sticking to rare physical releases due to my viewing habits and concerns over downloads being more akin to licenses that can be withdrawn. i'd like more 80's japanese films, it's quite undervalued and underrepresented.

i only buy a small handful of films each year now, but even those will drop off if we're £20+ without fail wherever i look, unless i luck out and an offer makes it drop somewhat, but the higher it goes, the more of a stretch it is for it to become viable for anyone who has other uses for their money even on a heavy discount.

[Cinematt]

Unfortunately there isn't a 'wider audience' for physical media anymore, about 90% of spend is on streaming or digital purchases. Blu-ray is about a third of the physical media market, DVD is still top and if you want to know who's still buying that then you only have to look at the charts which had Downton Abbey as the #2 release of 2022 (behind Maverick). So all of blu-ray is about 3% of video sales. There's nobody left but the collectors, so anyone that treasures this stuff is going to have to get used to slightly higher prices because the volume of sales isn't there to allow razor thin margins anymore.
FWIW when I started buying DVDs in 1999 they were £20 a piece (my first purchases, Ghostbusters and Out of Sight, were excitedly grabbed in a 2 for £30 sale in Woolworths) and there's not much that's cheaper now than it was a quarter of a century ago.
The reality is a lot of collectors like to feel like they're getting more for their money than 'just' a movie, and when companies can clearly see in their sales stats that cheaper bare bones editions don't sell and things with slip cases do, it's not even a choice.

[Cinematt]

Also, for anyone that needs amazon to be their retailer, Door 1+2 has dropped to £19.99.

[logboy]

Originally Posted by Cinematt

Unfortunately there isn't a 'wider audience' for physical media anymore, about 90% of spend is on streaming or digital purchases. Blu-ray is about a third of the physical media market, DVD is still top and if you want to know who's still buying that then you only have to look at the charts which had Downton Abbey as the #2 release of 2022 (behind Maverick). So all of blu-ray is about 3% of video sales. There's nobody left but the collectors, so anyone that treasures this stuff is going to have to get used to slightly higher prices because the volume of sales isn't there to allow razor thin margins anymore.
FWIW when I started buying DVDs in 1999 they were £20 a piece (my first purchases, Ghostbusters and Out of Sight, were excitedly grabbed in a 2 for £30 sale in Woolworths) and there's not much that's cheaper now than it was a quarter of a century ago.
The reality is a lot of collectors like to feel like they're getting more for their money than 'just' a movie, and when companies can clearly see in their sales stats that cheaper bare bones editions don't sell and things with slip cases do, it's not even a choice.

what i, or anyone, paid in the distant, naive days is largely moot, for me.

if you're looking for more for your money than just a movie, i'd say extras as pretty much it - that's features on the discs, booklets to some lesser extent. even these seemed largely misguided places to put such content; a large contingent apparently now seeks out OOP DVDs for academic value due it being placed there and not in books.

if you're paying ... £20 plus for anything other than the disc content, be it for packaging or freebies, scarcity and a general feeling of well being from looking at your shelves, you may just be missing the point entirely, and doing nobody any favours arguably.

even largely out of buying physical for the last four or five years, i've seen people popping up who enthusiastically collect labels i'd say are amongst those who started out with the most individual and well-placed intentions. they're now also purveyors of collectors items, not films. people will watch them, eventually (i guess) but i'm not convinced they can see past what they're most visibly and audibly capable of explaining having gained pleasure or insight from.

[The Mole]

Originally Posted by MifuneFan

That was for this French release from ‎ Le Chat qui Fume

https://lechatquifume.myshopify.com/...-dead-trap-1-2

Hmmm. Germany also only got parts 1 and 2 on BD. What about part 3? Why is that not released on BD?

[Cinematt]

I think the artwork has been part of enjoying the whole package of a movie from cinema's earliest days. And I do like the look of them all on my shelves, my little home office is basically clad in movies and books about movies so I get to spend a lot of my days surrounded by them. I possibly find it comforting because of how many years I spent working in a video shop surrounded by movie art all day.
I'm not one for posters or lobby cards or postcards in sets, they never end up on the walls so seem a waste to me, but I love some good written content so I have a chance to learn a bit more about the movie without just staring at a screen (which takes up a rather large % of my life already!) and I'll often grab a random release off my shelf and have a read of its booklet, not least to get some inspiration for other movies to seek out. On-disc extras are obviously great, though I wish I had more time for commentaries, there are still far too many of those un-listened to on my shelves. So I think there are plenty of different ways you can enjoy a release aside from just watching the film, and they all have their own value. I'm a few hundred titles away from being caught up on my collection, and I fully expect to die with a massive unwatched pile because there's always so many damned interesting movies around!

[Fiicere]

The way I see it is that I'm buying into a shudder-style curation of movies. If it wasn't for TWF I wouldn't have seen Nobuhiko Obayashi's films besides Eureka's Hausu release, and who has now become my favourite Japanese director (Packaging is a plus). I collect TWF movies because I put my trust into discovering movies I wouldn't otherwise have known about. And yes some movies I didn't like (for example Zokki, Tezuka's Barbara), but I'm happy to own them and maybe revisit some other time; because big streaming services don't have that luxury.

I have watched many movies and have at most a surface knowledge of cinematography, themes, acting etc. that your propose from your last paragraph, but that doesn't stop me from enjoying cinema. I don't know how to intricately describe what I'm seeing from an academic viewpoint, I can't write for shit; most essays to me seem pretentious and try to fill some word count. I watch movies for the presentation, director's eye, acting, not some intermediary to explain why that is like that or why the actor's acting when I can see it for myself and resonate on my own terms. But that's not to say I don't welcome extras, extras are important like interviews, BTS, if you want to delve deeper into the film.

As such, I don't think I'm missing the point entirely. If anything, to truly enjoy cinema you have to go to the cinema before television and VHS, DVD made it easier to enjoy a prone to flame, hindrance to use your legs to see a piece of entertainment.