Hollywood's Next Great Business Model: Praying That Stars Die

parislemon:

When asked why The Bodyguard was pulled from Netflix streaming following Whitney Houston’s death, Dan McDermott got the following response from a Netflix rep:

I just went and talked to my main supervisor as to why the movie had been pulled and the reason it was pulled was the production company pulled the streaming rights from us because all the publicity after Whitney Houston’s passing there was an opportunity to make really a very large amount of money on the DVD sales of her movies. So they’re going to pull all the streaming titles we have of Whitney Houston so they can make more money off the DVD sales of her movies.

What fucking scumbags. Not Netflix, which sadly has no control over situations like this, but the movie studio. 

It seems like Hollywood is eyeing two business models in order to preserve their precious DVD sales (which are tanking more each day):

1) Make it basically impossible to rent a film. It used to be that you could rent a movie the day it came out for sale on DVD. Then it was 30 days later. Now it’s 56 days later. And you can’t even think about renting the films for 28 days.

As a reminder, torrents currently have no such window.

2) Hope and pray that big time stars die to temporarily boost sales. And instead of doing everything in you power to ensure that fans have easy access to remember the stars they cherished, pull all access except for the most expensive and limited variety in order to maximize profits.

Wow. I guess I’m not surprised, but that’s something else

Source: parislemon

127 Notes/ Hide

  1. human-plus reblogged this from jmdickinson and added:
    Yeah, but all streaming vids look like shit. :/
  2. jmdickinson reblogged this from arainert and added:
    Ugh, just die already, DVDs
  3. blackboxoffice reblogged this from dbreunig
  4. dbreunig reblogged this from parislemon and added:
    Don’t forget: 3) Rehashing our old properties...death (pun not intended) rather than...
  5. pod313 reblogged this from parislemon
  6. dhrosen reblogged this from arainert
  7. ehy310 reblogged this from parislemon and added:
    Two recent cartoons illustrate your exact point here - see this: http://www.cagle.com/2012/02/whintey/ and this:...
  8. seattle-gadgets reblogged this from arainert
  9. ilikethings24 reblogged this from creamconecoffee
  10. creamconecoffee reblogged this from mike-vaz
  11. general-unclassifiable reblogged this from arainert
  12. arainert reblogged this from parislemon
  13. estenh reblogged this from parislemon and added:
    Dear Hollywood: when pundits are just saying “to hell with it, pirate everything,” you might sorta have a problem.
  14. megamaniaco reblogged this from parislemon
  15. vaguelyhazee reblogged this from parislemon
  16. alexthoughts reblogged this from parislemon and added:
    I haven’t run into these issues with rental, but I haven’t regularly rented DVDs for a couple years. And they wonder why...