New Strategy for 'Tron' DVD | Hacker News Reader

New Strategy for 'Tron' DVD

mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com

19 pointsdonohoe23 comments

Can I just say, as one of the (many) people who would like to purchase the original Tron:

Quit with the "added value". Sell us the damn movie!

/downloads. http://thenextweb.com/shareables/files/2010/02/piratedvd.jpg

(side note: why can't you pause on the FBI warning? What if I really wanted to read it? Can't rewind either...)

Consider yourself lucky you don't have to sit through the "Piracy - It's a Crime" warning that we have in the UK - which I find exceptionally irritating.

Transcript and video for those fortunate enough to not have to sit through this crap: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmZm8vNHBSU

YOU WOULDN'T STEAL A CAR

YOU WOULDN'T STEAL A HANDBAG

YOU WOULDN'T STEAL A TELEVISION

YOU WOULDN'T STEAL A MOVIE

DOWNLOADING PIRATED FILMS IS STEALING*

STEALING IS AGAINST THE LAW

PIRACY. IT'S A CRIME.†

* No, it's copyright infringement, not stealing.

† It's a civil offence in most cases, not criminal.

Thanks, I had to watch that again just to confirm how irritating it is... :-|

Whenever I read something about piracy I cant help remembering IT crowd ad xD http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALZZx1xmAzg Hilarious

USA here: I've had them. Only a small fraction have them, but that's probably partially because I don't have many new movies.

edit: watched the youtubed version: I've only seen that one once. Apparently we've got a different one, maybe a little less annoying.

Honestly, does anyone think this is a good idea?

Everyone I know who wanted to relive the first movie has already gone straight to their nearest torrent site and grabbed a copy, and likely won't replace it with an official copy, other than maybe as a combo with the new movie.

The only reason I could see is if Disney was embarrassed by the first movie, and thought that having it out there would reduce ticket and future sales of recordings of the sequel.

I don't see it. Disney has never let embarassment get in the way of money before, unless...

Is it racist?

The hypothesis I've heard is that Disney fears people will find the original Tron dated and campy. This might in turn make people less interested in Tron Legacy. It seems Disney will rather lose some DVD sales for the original than risk lower ticket sales for the sequel.

In that case you would think they'd tell YouTube to take down all of the clips from the original Tron.

The thing that makes me doubt this is that Tron Legacy isn't a reboot, it's a full blown sequel.

I don't recall any race specific issues in it - last I remember everyone was white, or a computer program.

And they did release it in the past - it isn't a "Song of the South".

You missed the point. Disney has always valued money over embarrassment in the past with regards to releasing movies, with the exception of Song of the South.

I don't know about anyone else, but what I read in that article was: "Torrent better product than DVDs and online media stores".

I think torrent is the killer app for Google TV.

Talking about that, I recently bought some DVDs and they had no English captions (I'm hearing impaired). I was incredibly pissed off, so I pirated them. Then, I was given House as a gift (TV Series) - lo and behold, no captions. sigh

Lack of captions is pretty much inexcusable. Especially for a scripted show.

Are you sure it had no captions? Or do you simply mean that there were no english subtitles?

I've bought a couple of TV DVDs in the past (ER, I think) where there were no subtitles, but if I enabled the closed captioning feature on my TV, the captions were displayed.

Still doesn't answer why the public wouldn't buy the old version if it was released right now

Margins.

They can charge $30-40 (maybe more) for a box set of the 2 movies plus some filler content.

But a rereleased DVD of a 1982 film that came out in 2002 would be in the $5 bin in no time.

With those margins they can't spend on advertising for the original one either. So it makes sense to manufacturer that added value in well timed bursts.

Maybe you ought to check Amazon; used Tron DVDs are starting at $99 and VHS tapes at $55. Unless they put out a large number of them, I doubt they would hit the discount bins very quickly.

Right - that's because the stock has been kept artificially low which is necessary for the strategy to work.

What I'm talking about is that if they continued to flood the market with those dvds it would be in the $5 bin and make people a whole lot less likely to buy the box set.

Ha, I wonder how much my VHS of Tron is worth.

As long as there isn't a mythbusters:tron, because wow has Hollywood jumped the shark or what (ie. green hornet mythbusters).

They did the same thing with that show Storm Chasers last month too and it was just as bad as that atrocious Green Hornet episode.

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