Goodies Worthy of 'Arkham'

Best Buy's 'Batman: Assault on Arkham' with figurine

As is typical for the DC Universe animated superhero movie brand, the new Batman: Assault on Arkham Blu-ray was a prime focus for retail exclusives upon its Aug. 12 release.

Best Buy offered a version of the Blu-ray combo pack with a pack-on Harley Quinn figurine, while Target offered the Blu-ray with a steelbook case. Walmart offered a two-DVD special edition of the movie that won’t be available at other outlets for at least a month.

Among the other new releases, Sony Pictures’ The Blacklist: The Complete First Season was the only other title with any noticeable promotional interest. Best Buy offered the Blu-ray with a T-shirt, while Target offered an exclusive “Red Edition” DVD with a villains dossier.

Anticipating the Aug. 26 disc release of The Walking Dead: The Complete Fourth Season, Walmart has set up a display of “Dead” merchandise, such as hats and posters, and is touting an exclusive Blu-ray of the upcoming season set with a pack-on key collectible.

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New on Disc: 'The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad/Fun and Fancy Free' and more …

The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad/Fun and Fancy Free (Blu-ray)

Street 8/12
Disney, Animated, $36.99 Blu-ray, ‘G.’
1947-49. In this welcomely ticklish twofer of Disney postwar recharge efforts, Ichabod/Toad is mighty solid, though Fun and Fancy Free comes off as uneven.
Read the Full Review

We Won’t Grow Old Together

Street 8/12
Kino Lorber, Drama, $29.95 DVD, $34.95 Blu-ray, NR.
In French with English subtitles.
Stars Marlene Jobert, Jean Yanne, Macha Meril.
1972. This is a welcome release of the second feature from French writer-director Maurice Pialat, a filmmaker of limited output whose movies offer a lot.
Read the Full Review
 

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Retailers 'Divergent' With Exclusives

Walmart's 'Divergent' Deluxe Edition

The Aug. 5 release of Lionsgate's Divergent prompted the major retailers to line up their own exclusives to try to attract buyers.

Walmart offered the most substantial edition of Divergent, loading a deluxe version of the Blu-ray combo pack with a 32-page collector's book, four additional featurettes, an excerpt from the new Four book, photo spreads and more.

Target offered the Divergent Blu-ray combo pack with exclusive box art, temporary tattoos and a bonus disc with 45 minutes of additional featurettes.

Best Buy offered the Divergent Blu-ray with steelbook packaging.

Other exclusives at Walmart included a $14.96 DVD of a new live-action Tarzan movie, from Lionsgate, and a DVD of Nickelodeon's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Pulverizer Power ($5).

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New on Disc: 'The Time Machine' and more …

The Time Machine (Blu-ray)

Warner, Sci-Fi, $19.98 Blu-ray, NR.
Stars Rod Taylor, Alan Young, Yvette Mimieux.
1960. George Pal’s sci-fi fantasy from H.G. Wells’ great yarn easily retains its modest charms from its matinee days.
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Separate Tables

Kino Lorber, Drama, $19.95 DVD, $29.95 Blu-ray, NR.
Stars David Niven, Deborah Kerr, Burt Lancaster, Rita Hayworth, Wendy Hiller.
1958. This is a real actor’s show, and a very solid Blu-ray presentation of a handsome drama photographed by Charles Lang for one of his 18 Oscar nominations.
Read the Full Review
 

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Transaction vs.Subscription: The Next Battle Royale?

Remember that old line about how the more things change, the more they stay the same? From the very beginning of the home entertainment industry, the studios — who control the content, which of course is the single most important factor in the whole equation — have consistently done battle with various enemies, real or perceived.

In the early days of the business, they tried to crack down on the proliferating video retailers who were renting their videocassettes and pocketing the money. They ultimately lost in court and wound up toying with all sorts of strategies to share in the revenue.

When DVD came around and consumer habits shifted from renting to buying movies and other content, the studios found a new nemesis: deep discounting mass merchants who, in Hollywood’s view, devalued the product. Once again, the studios came up with various strategies to preserve their margins. On the catalog end, they worked with key retailers to agree on tiered pricing, so that the “race to the bottom” wasn’t a straight, head-first plunge. On the new release front, they began issuing two different versions of new releases, a bare-bones DVD the mass merchants could sell for peanuts and a more expensive version, packed with extras, that could fetch a significantly higher price.

A decade later, when the sellthrough business began to level off, studios went after Netflix and Redbox, which through their subscription and kiosk rental models, the studios felt, were cannibalizing sales. A bitter fight ensued, with studios refusing to sell Netflix and Redbox their product. The rental services figured out all sorts of work-arounds, including sending teams into Walmart to buy huge quantities of new releases. Several studios went to court, but ultimately, in 2010, everything was settled at the negotiating table, with three studios now holding back new releases from Netflix and Redbox for 28 days and, in return, extending the rental services better pricing.

Moving into the digital realm, the studios are now pushing Digital HD, or “electronic sellthrough,” which essentially consists of selling downloads to consumers. But despite early release windows the business remains on a slow roll, with consumers by far preferring to stream movies — the electronic equivalent of video rental.

This, in turn, now promises to evolve into the next big battle: transaction versus subscription. If you thought the studios hated video rental, that’s nothing compared to how they feel about subscription, which not only takes them out of the revenue loop but puts all content on a level playing field. So far the studios have been able to keep hot new releases from being included, but there’s already so much other stuff available for around 10 bucks a month that new-release sales are bound to suffer.

How do the studios keep the transactional part of the business alive? That’s a very, very good question — and one that ultimately will be decided not by Hollywood, but by the consumer.

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A Whole New Virtual World at Comic-Con

Among all the ubergeek hoopla, cosplayers, stars and Hollywood marketing events at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con International was a virtual player that could prove revolutionary for the entertainment business.

Oculus VR, recently acquired by Facebook, powered several virtual reality exhibits both on and off the show floor, resulting in long lines and quickly maxed-out showings. HBO’s “Game of Thrones” exhibit across the street from the convention center featured a harrowing, but exciting, virtual reality ride up an elevator to the top of The Wall. As my virtual trip had me cresting The Wall and falling I grabbed the sides of the booth cage in anticipation of a drop, a testament to the effectiveness of the product. Other properties using the virtual reality device as promotion at Comic-Con were “Sleepy Hollow,” Pacific Rim, Into the Storm and X-Men: Days of Future Past, which provided a virtual reality experience on the show floor in which you are Professor X heading into Cerebro and looking for mutants.

Each of the virtual reality experiences was short, and you did have to wear a rather cumbersome headset that I confess I didn’t have time to adjust properly. I don’t know whether longer-form virtual reality entertainment will take off anytime soon. (Witness the disappointing falloff of 3D, in part due to the need for glasses.) But I didn’t get sick looking around in the virtual world for the few moments I was there, which makes this entertainment consumer and observer eager to see more.

Getting physical for a moment, I also noticed the many booths selling discs at Comic-Con. Fox created elaborate and exclusive disc sets for the Comic-Con crowd, and even a booth in the anime biz, which has gone more digital than other parts of the industry, featured disc sets that fans were eagerly picking over. The collector seemed alive and well at the Con.

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Retailers Float 'Noah' Exclusives

Target's 'Noah' with wood packaging

Among the July 29 new releases, Paramount’s Noah attracted the most retail attention.

Target offered the Blu-ray, a retelling of the Noah’s Ark biblical tale, in special wood packaging with 45 minutes of exclusive bonus content.

Best Buy offered Noah with steelbook packaging.

Walmart offered the Blu-ray packed with a CD of songs inspired by the film.

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New on Disc: 'Paris Blues' and more …

Paris Blues

Street 7/29
Kino Lorber, Drama, $24.95 DVD, $29.95 Blu-ray, NR.
Stars Paul Newman, Sidney Poitier, Joanne Woodward, Diahann Carroll.
1961. Martin Ritt’s star-powered drama from Marlon Brando’s production company is one of the first movies to deal even peripherally with the American civil rights movement from around the time the lunch counter sit-ins were commencing.
Read the Full Review

Brannigan (Blu-ray)

Available via www.ScreenArchives.com
Twilight Time, Drama, $29.95 Blu-ray, ‘PG.’
Stars John Wayne, Richard Attenborough, Judy Geeson, Mel Ferrer, John Vernon.
1975. In this cinematic nut job, John Wayne plays a Chicago detective who heads to London to track down a bail-jumper (John Vernon), and quickly clashes with Scotland Yard over police procedures.
Read the Full Review
 

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'Heaven' Gets Real at Retail

For the July 22 new releases, retailers focused their attention on Sony Pictures' Heaven Is for Real.

Target offered to give consumers a $5 gift card with the purchase of the faith-based film on disc with a copy of the book upon which it is based (priced at $12.80 for the paperback).

Walmart offered the Heaven Is for Real Blu-ray with an exclusive bonus disc containing a featurette about the family that inspired the story. Walmart also offered a DVD two-pack of the film with Soul Surfer.

Another exclusive at Walmart involved Universal's An American Girl: Isabelle Dances Into the Spotlight, offering the DVD with a pack-on back-to-school set.

Target offered the Isabelle DVD with a sketchbook.

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A Peek Into the Digital Future?

The issue of Netflix wanting to run their fleet of 18 wheelers roughshod over Verizon’s roads without paying extra taxes to maintain them got me thinking about how this plays out over the long haul. I thought about a few potential scenarios, some more possible than others:

■ Someone new (Google?) comes into the picture as a new mega-ISP, flush with massive bandwidth from all the dark fiber they have been quietly buying up around the country. They serve as both content provider and distributor, cornering the market on lightning-fast downloads and streaming for an incredibly cheap price subsidized by its other businesses. To compete, Verizon buys Netflix, and other companies partner up with equally synchronistic bedfellows. Within three years all ventures collapse since nobody understands the other side(s) of the business and they eat each other from within. Somewhere, the ghost of Blockbuster says, “Heeeyyyy … that’s my jam!”



■ Fiber? Cable? DSL? It’s all obsolete as everything goes wireless. After quietly building wireless bandwidth to a level where it can support the traffic, the cell phone companies drop their data limits and embrace streaming big time, adding set-top boxes that are basically cell phones you can operate with your cell phone. (After the Big One finally hits SoCal, their spinner powered STB is the only game in town.) Soon, the cable and fiber companies are begging Netflix to use their roads at a discount. The new super ISP, T-Mob-Verizo-Flix, just laughs and has the former CEO of Redbox peel them another grape.

■  The whole issue becomes moot as the last person in America to learn how to use BitTorrent (93-year-old Marjorie Henspittle of Appalachia, Tenn.) logs on to The Pirate Bay and successfully downloads season 12 of “Game of Thrones” — the one where Tommen hooks up with Deanery’s daughter (Honey Boo Boo Stormborn) and they rule Westeros with an iron fist, a velvet glove and dragons. Nobody in Hollywood gets paid for anything anymore, but they still continue to create programming simply to qualify for awards shows.

■ Once every physical dollar has completely been replaced with a digital penny, the studios find that they can only afford to create Vines and superhero movies with sock puppets. No problem, though, since the average Mac user can make an effects-laden comic book movie in their backyard using a 4K camera for less than $500. Soon the world runs out of comic book heroes so we have to import them from the Third World. (Look! Up in the sky! It’s Súper Poderoso Hombre Asombroso Fantástico!) Nobody is getting paid (still!), but since network TV is now 97% awards shows (and “CSI”), the content flows and flows.  



■ YouTube is allowed to place remote wireless cameras everywhere, and just by being born you are automatically signing a release allowing them to broadcast webcam footage of you getting hit by a car, robbing a liquor store or whatever shows up on their cameras. But the most popular YouTube channel, now in its 15th year, is the Sneezing Panda Channel (SPC), responsible for 73% of all traffic on fiber and cable. (In second place, the Getting Hit by a Car channel, which mostly is people throwing themselves in front of cars in an attempt to win something at the YouTube Award Show.) 



It’s gonna be a brave new world! How’s your bandwidth?

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