Tarnower

I haven't rented at Blockbuster for many months. Over the weekend, I decided to browse through my local BB to see what kind of catalog films they had that I passed-on for purchasing.

Inspired by Danol's recent threads about Charlton Heston's "Soylent Green" and "The Omega Man," I thought those would be interesting titles to rent, since I had no intentions of purchasing.

Well, forget about renting them at BB. In fact, as I walked up and down the aisles, and even along the New Release wall, I could barely find any older films that are new to DVD. Although there must be hundreds of titles that never even made into theaters lining the New Release wall with dozens of copies available.

I asked the manager about why there aren't hardly any older films new to disc that are available for rent, and she muttered something about, "whatever the buyers send, that's what we have." She couldn't give me any reason at all why the buyers wouldn't make these types of titles available. I asked her to look up a couple of upcoming older titles making their DVD debuts ("All That Jazz" and "The Hospital"). Neither could be found in her Coming Up section of the computer.

And Blockbuster wonders why their traffic is down. I think from this point on, I will just become involved with Netflix. The upcoming documentary "A Decade Under the Influence" (about the great filmmaking of the 1970s generation) is something I would definitely love to rent, but I won't even count on BB even having it.

Father Merrin

One of the many reasons I loathe ' the buster'.

Movie_Man

You just nailed one of my biggest peeves with the big chains rental stores - the lack of older/classic titles.
Clearly, they cater only to recent theatrical releases.


PS: Both "Omega Man" and "Soylent Green" are lsited as "Available Now" in my Netflix queue.

Tarnower

Thanks for the info. I am definitely going to find out what Netflix is all about.

I would appreciate any positive/negative feedback regarding Netflix from anyone out there that has been using them.

pdjennings

Just another of the hundreds of reasons why buying has it all over renting.

whotony

the one i work at just got in the new dvd of house of wax.
every week we get one or 2 new older cat titles for the favorite section.

but we usually get them 2 or 3 weeks after street.
with a few exceptions like giant and once upon a time in america when we got them on street.
another reletively recent one was jaws 4.
oh and before that jaws 3.

rkndkn

I noticed while browsing around Blockbuster the other day that the older films new to DVD are often put in their respective category -- drama, comedy, etc. They never hit the new release walls.