Ryan Anderson has been good enough to give me two mentions in the last couple days. Most recently he quotes from my latest FilmThreat MMM column, the one on Pretty Persuasion.
On Tuesday, though, he (rightly) questioned the logic Buena Vista is dispaying by releasing four different variant covers for their upcoming Sin City DVD release. Here’s Ryan:
I don’t understand the marketing behind Sin City, they are releasing the same DVD with 4 different covers. Do they expect me to collect them all? Waiting for the
special edition…
I don’t think they are really expecting to people to buy four copies of a bare-bones DVD. Would they like you to? Yeah, of course they’d like you to but I don’t think the studio has reasonable expectations that people are going to drop $80+ on four DVDs, especially when there’s a special edition coming, likely before Christmas.
Instead I think the four different covers are an attempt by the studio to create buzz and make the covers a discussion point among collectors. They want people to compare with their friends which version they each bought and maybe encourage a group of people to all buy different ones. I think there’s a better way they could have done this, perhaps by including pictures with each different poster that could have been slipped into the front of the DVD case, but I kind of get this move. My bigger problem is with the whole releasing of the bare-bones edition in the first place, but I don’t think there’s any getting around that practice.
So there’s my two cents.
By the way, Ryan, I completely agree with your comment about the Cubs. (See the bottom of his Tuesday post.)
–Chris
Chris Thilk 