DVDs: Wave of the future for movie watching?
By Casey Gillis on May. 31, 2007
Coming soon to a video store shelf near you: “Transmorphers!”
Sounds a lot like “Transformers,” doesn’t it?
That’s by design.
The Asylum, a Los Angeles-based film production and distribution company, is releasing “Transmorphers” on DVD at the end of June, just a few weeks before the big-screen, live-action version of the popular cartoon “Transformers” hits theaters.
“The fact is, we can’t afford to spend a lot of money advertising or promoting our movies, so sometimes we use awareness and interest that’s already out there to draw viewers to our titles,” says Paul Bales, owner of The Asylum. “We certainly don’t believe we’re drawing audiences away from the majors. But if someone is interested in giant robots, for example, we think they’ll be interested in seeing more than just one movie on that topic.”
Direct-to-DVD or direct-to-video (DTV) movies like the ones The Asylum produces used to be considered a dumping ground of movies that weren’t good enough for theaters.
Not anymore.
The home video industry itself is booming, bringing in roughly $24 billion a year (in 2006, theatrical releases grossed a total of $9 billion), and according to DVD Exclusive Online, the DTV market has grossed $3 billion annually over the past few years.
“Not every film made can get a theatrical release,” says Pam White, executive vice president of Florida-based Maverick Entertainment, which has more than 450 DTV films in its catalog.
“There are just too many films made each year to allow for that. Not too long ago, some people thought that a lack of a theatrical release must have meant the film wasn’t good,” she says. “… Consumers have come to realize that independent films can be quite entertaining. Now, instead of looking away from a direct-to-DVD release, many are giving it a second glance.”
Bales thinks the growing DTV market can also be attributed to the price of DVDs going down.
“It has allowed people to collect more and more films and allows them to expand their libraries beyond just the giant studio releases,” he says. “Not only do we see a lot more ‘niche’ film buyers, but buyers making choices based on the extra features that DVD allows.”
Big studios like MGM, Paramount and Warner Bros. have created departments with the sole purpose of producing and releasing DTV films — or, as they’ve recently started calling them, DVD Premieres (DVDPs).
“You still have the true independent spirits out there making quality, entertaining films,” White says. “But you also have (more) bigger-budget films with more recognizable names in them being released direct-to-DVD today than you did a year or five years or 10 years ago due to the lack of theatrical screens and other reasons.”
Some recognizable titles in the works at the studios mentioned above include sequels to “Beetlejuice” (sans Michael Keaton), “Save the Last Dance,” “The Lost Boys” and “Training Day.”
Direct-to-video sequels or prequels are nothing new — Disney’s been doing it with virtually all of its animated films, starting with “The Return of Jafar,” a follow-up to “Aladdin,” in 1994.
And since the third “American Pie” film was released in theaters in 2003, there have been two sequels — and we bet there’s more to come — that went straight to video store shelves.
“American Pie Presents: Band Camp” (2006), which focused on Stifler’s younger brother, earned more than $25 million in rentals and sales, according to DVD Exclusive.
By attaching DTV releases to films we already know and, in some cases, love, the theory is that there’s already a built-in audience for them.
That’s why you see so many “National Lampoon’s” videos stumping for the same popularity as “Animal House.”
Some other past direct-to-video releases include “Bring It On: All or Nothing,” “Behind Enemy Lines II: Axis of Evil,” “Cinderella III: A Twist in Time,” “Road House 2” and “The Dukes of Hazard: The Beginning.”
The big screen version of “Dukes” wasn’t a breakout box office success, but it “reinstated the name again,” says Andrew Gernhard, owner of Synthetic Cinema International, another DTV production company. “(The studio says), ‘Why don’t we do a movie for $4 mil, replace (the big stars), and that’s where they make their money.”
But it’s no longer just no-name stars headlining these releases.
Former movie stars like Jean-Claude Van Damme, Steven Seagal and Dolph Lundgren are still earning some pretty hefty paychecks in DVDPs, commanding salaries sometimes as high as $10 million a film.
While their movies are usually intended for a DTV release from the get-go, others end up going that route when they can’t find a distributor.
But it’s not the death sentence it once was, and it’s not entirely uncommon to find A-list stars on DVD cases instead of on movie posters.
In 2005, Justin Timberlake, Kevin Spacey and Morgan Freeman starred in the DTV release “Edison Force.”
Anne Hathaway — who made a name for herself playing goody-two-shoes in movies like “The Princess Diaries” and “Ella Enchanted” — played against type as a girl who falls in with the wrong crowd in 2005’s “Havoc.”
And Vivica A. Fox has starred in a couple of them: 2006’s “The Hard Corps,” which actually co-starred Van Damme, and 2007’s “Motives 2.”
As the big studios wet their feet in the DTV market, the smaller companies — like Maverick Entertainment, The Asylum and Synthetic Cinema — are continuing to do what they’ve been doing for years.
Maverick, which was started 10 years ago, releases about 52 DVDPs — everything from comedies to action flicks to thrillers — a year, all with budgets under $3 million, while The Asylum, also 10 years old, releases between 10 and 15 a year, with budgets ranging from $200,000 to under $1 million.
Gernhard’s Synthetic Cinema International, based in Hamden, Conn., specializes in cheesy creature features made for less than $1 million, which he says big studios would consider to be no budget at all.
“Anything between $5 (million) and $20 million is considered low-budget,” he says. “And anything $20 (million) or so to $50 million is medium-budget.”
Synthetic Cinema is a newer company, with only five titles in its library — “Predator Island,” “Blood Descendants,” “Lycan,” “Trees” and its sequel “The Root of all Evil” — and two more currently in production.
“Trees” was the first feature-length film Gernhard ever did.
He was producing educational videos at the time, and he and a friend set out to make a parody of “Jaws.” But instead of a murderous great white, their villain was a killer pine tree being hunted by a lumberjack, a forest ranger and a botanist.
They released it right around the time of the 25th anniversary of “Jaws” and actually sold the film to Blockbuster, who put it on shelves right next to the classic 1979 flick.
Much like what Bales does at The Asylum, Gernhard says he does what’s called forecasting: he looks at what the big studios are doing and produces films similar in nature.
That’s where “Lycan,” a werewolf horror flick that’s being released on video by Lions Gate, came from.
“Werewolves are going to be big for a while,” Gernhard says, citing upcoming big-screen movies like “Underworld 3” and a remake of Universal’s “The Wolf Man.”
“One thing that always sells are sharks,” he says. “… And Big Foot. You do anything about a sasquatch or Big Foot (and it sells).”
Gernhard says that most DTV films of are point-of-purchases, meaning that most people who rent or buy them do so after coming across them randomly in the store. You’re not going to find ads for a movie like “Predator Island” anywhere else.
“When people are walking through (the video store), everything’s rented except for ‘Predator Island,’” he says. “Otherwise, a lot of people aren’t going to see these movies.”
But, as we said before, the tide does seem to be turning.
“I definitely believe that perceptions have changed about direct-to-DVD films, because I think audiences are becoming more sophisticated about the distribution of films,” Bales says. “I think people realize few films get a theatrical release and those that do are more than likely going to be studio films. There is quality everywhere, and I think that’s what people are seeking.”
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