Pop Culture Curmudgeon

Straight to DVD: The Wave of the Future, or Still Just Code for "A Crappy Movie"?

Matthew McConaughey’s newest flick, Surfer Dude, skipped the theaters and went straight to DVD. (Read more about the movie at DVD Talk.)

Just a few years ago, straight to video meant the distributor didn’t think the movie could hope to recoup the marketing costs of a theatrical release because it was so bad. These films were what I called part of the New Deal for Hollywood. They kept writers, actors, and crews working for the sake of working. Every now and then, a gem would slide through, though I can’t think of any off the top of my head.

Then Disney started making straight-to-video sequels to their animated blockbusters. This move allowed them to capitalize on the name recognition of the originals without incurring huge new marketing expenses. I’m not a Disney movie fan, but my gut feeling is that these movies were of the same caliber as the originals without the theatrical buzz.

Straight-to-video sequels are the norm in other genres. The Starship Troopers franchise continues on DVD, though I’ve heard the sequels suck. (I am a huge fan of the original movie.)

Steven Soderbergh tested a multi-platform release for his movie Bubble in 2005. It was a box office failure, but a very bold experiment.

During Arctic Blast 2008, I watched a lot of movies that I had never heard of but that were quite good. Evening is the best of the lot. It had a good life on the film festival circuit and a modest life in the theaters, showing on 977 of an estimated 18,000 screens in the U.S. It would have been a good candidate for a multi-platform release, as its cast–Toni Collette, Meryl Streep, Vanessa Redgrave, Glenn Close, Claire Danes–has good name recognition.

I mentioned yesterday that it is hard for me to get to the theater to see movies since we got our dogs. I prefer to watch a movie at home where I can pause for potty breaks and rewind if I missed something in the cacophony that is caused by two 100-pound dogs hovering near two years in age. I would have bought Sex and the City when it was released in the summer of this year. Instead, I rented it from Netflix about a month after its DVD release because I was no longer excited about it. There’s $20 of mine New Line will never see.

Could the multi-platform release be the wave of the future, as Robert Cort argues for in a 2006 editorial? Will we see the theater die to be replaced by straight-to-DVD for all movies? Or will we continue in the same business model, with big-budget movies released in the theater that fewer and fewer people still attend and all other movies relegated to the DVD shelves?