Quality Rules

From May, 2009... the end of the DVD market is predicted!

From Patrick Goldstein's LA Times Article:
Even more alarming, especially for studios who've thrived on seducing moviegoers into seeing mediocre product, is the realization that audiences are becoming more quality conscious. In the past, if a forgettable action film hit pay dirt at the box office, it would perform correspondingly well in DVD, allowing studios in greenlight meetings to provide a conversion rate--i.e. that if a movie of a certain genre made $100 million in the theaters, that would equal X millions of units in DVD. But judging from recent DVD sales figures, films that had poor word-of-mouth--signaling significant audience dissatisfaction--were underperforming in DVD, even if they had enjoyed lofty box-office numbers.

The example that made the biggest impact in studio circles involved "Iron Man" and "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull." The two films, released within weeks of each other last summer, did almost the exact same amount of business in their U.S. theatrical runs--roughly $318 million. But when they arrived on DVD, "Iron Man," the film that performed far better in exit polls (not to mention with critics), easily outperformed "Indiana Jones," whose DVD numbers were far lower than expected. Among the big-grossing summer films, "Hancock" was also a poor performer (in terms of box office vs. DVD numbers), while the DVD numbers for such well-liked family films as "Wall-E" and "Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa" held up far better.

The rest of the article: DVD Collapse.

The problem, as on studio chief says in the article, is that they don't know what films will sell well on DVD and what films will sell poorly...

Hmmm.... if quality sells, shouldn't that be the focus?

And quality in this case doesn't seem to mean Oscar winners, those are not doing well on DVD. Quality seems to be big mainstream films that deliver what they promise and are *good* - so that you would want to see them again. IRON MAN... but not the new INDIANA JONES movie.

By the way, for all of you who have asked me over the years where they can get the actual sales numbers for individual DVD titles, the answer is in this article... you can't. They are kept top secret.

Classes On CD On Sale!

- Bill

IMPORTANT UPDATE:
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: Lame Confessions
Yesterday’s Dinner: City Wok sweet & sour chicken.

Movies: CRANK 2: HIGH VOLTAGE - If you like Roadrunner Cartoons, but don’t like animation - this is the film for you. The sequel is just like the first film, only more so. That’s either a bad thing, if you did not like CRANK; or a good thing, if (like me) you thought it was a fun way to kill a couple of hours. These films are so not to be taken seriously, there is no reason for that standard legal disclaimer at the end of the movie that the film is fiction. Folks, this film is so unreal it’s funny - and that’s probably the point. It *is* a cartoon with live actors.

It starts with a clever recap of the end of the last film - an Atari game showing two men falling from a helicopter and shooting and fighting until both are about to hit the ground... then they cut to “real life” as Chev Chelios (Jason Statham) slams into the roof of a car on the street, bounces, and lands right in front of the camera... dead... until one eye pops open. The end of the last film. Then, an unmarked truck pulls up and men in hazmat suits scrape him off the sidewalk and throw him in the back of the truck - taking off before the police and ambulances can arrive.

A couple of months later, Chev wakes up in some back alley doctor’s office hooked up to a million machines - alive - but his heart has been harvested for transplant (because it is the strongest heart of any man alive). Chev has an artificial heart keeping him alive so that the bad guys can sell of any other working parts he might have... including his penis. Chev doesn’t want them to harvest that particular organ and breaks out - fighting a bunch of people - and with his battery powered artificial heart goes on a cross-town quest to recover his actual heart. Even though that Atari game thing was only used for a minute at the beginning of the film, the rest of the movie is no more realistic with humans instead of bad video graphics - and that’s okay. This is a cartoon and cartoon laws of physics apply - also cartoon logic.

After Chev gets into a car wreck chasing his heart, the battery pack on his artificial heart is destroyed and only the small internal battery exists - and it must be manually recharged constantly... in a variety of silly ways that are fun. From jumper cables attached to some gang banger’s low rider car’s battery, to rubbing up against an old woman to create static electricity, to disregarding the Danger: High Voltage warning on a transformer box and just bear-hugging the humming electrical contents. Like Popeye with his cans of spinach, Chev must get charged up before he gets into a fight - and there are many of those. Along the way he finds his true love Eve (Amy Smart) working as a stripper (with strips of electrical tape over her nipples for some reason - makes no sense to me as her breasts are smashed against a police car window at one point just as the breasts of the Catholic High School Girls In Trouble breasts were smashed against the shower door in KENTUCKY FRIED MOVIE - and the combination of crass gratuitous nudity and those little bits of electrical tape modesty end up being funny... and maybe that was intended?).

Now that he’s found his true love, he must find his heart - and as silly and cartoony as this film is - this symbolism is entirely intended and is what made me like the first CRANK movie much more than I liked SHOOT ‘EM UP, even though no one can play a cartoon character like Paul Giamatti. The CRANK movies have heart... even though in this one the heart has been stolen.

As Chev and Eve and the other characters chase and fight across Los Angeles, each one sillier than the one that came before - in one instance turning into giant Godzilla-sized people who battle it out in a bad miniature version of the city, knocking down buildings and power towers, we get some Road Runner-Wiley Coyote laughs and at least one public sex scene on a horse racing track. Eventually David Carradine makes his appearance as the Chinese gang lord who needs a new heart - and wants the strongest heart in the world as his replacement... and the villain from the first film, who is now - much like Walt Disney - a head kept alive by machines. It’s just this crazy movie that never tries to be real or even make a whole lot of sense... and by the time we reach the end, they have set up an impossible situation that you know will lead to the third film in the series. I suspect in that one, Chev will have to borrow people’s skin for short periods of time - so maybe he’ll be able to go undercover? At today’s ticket prices, you have to be a fan of the first film to fully enjoy CRANK: HIGH VOLTAGE in the cinema, but on 99 cent rental night? You can’t go wrong.