Chris777

i've always been wondering about movies like the killer, and Salo and whether or not they were able to just pick up at stores like circuit city and best buy, i mean not like new releases overflowing with 100 plus copies but does anybody remember if they had one or two copies because my best buy's had abundences of robocop criterion when it was still hot.

Shap

My Circuit City had tons of The Jazz Singer for $7.99 when it came out many years ago.

renaldow

Stores like Best Buy or Circuit City usually only carry the Criterion releases of mass market movies. Stores like Tower, Borders, etc. most certainly had a few copies of these on the shelf just like they would any other Criterion release today.

Why wouldn't they?

littlefuzzy

Robocop is more of a mainstream movie, while The Killer and Salo had much smaller audiences.

I don't know if The Killer was released theatrically in the USA or not, but even so, it was a "foreign" film, and I would think that it wouldn't be as well known as a Hollywood film, except among fans of it's genre.

Salo is even more problematic, as it is foreign, it is old, and it is decidedly NOT mainstream with the mix of explicit sex and violence, debauchery, etc., although it has a certain notoriety.

Nowadays, Best Buy has a huge DVD section, but they still probably don't have more than 15 or 20 Criterion titles, and those are big Hollywood films for the most part... Chasing Amy, The Royal Tenenbaums, Seven Samurai, The Rock, Armageddon, The Beastie Boys music videos, and a few others.

I can't really see BB having any of the more esoteric Criterion films, although Borders and Barnes & Noble both carry many Criterion films, and they had The Killer and Salo back in the day.

ThatGuamGuy

Also, most Criterions go out of print only after at least a year, usually more, of being in print; 'Salo' was pulled after only a few weeks, wasn't it?