I mean have we ever tackled this subject here? Why to companies like Criterion have many of their older collection go OOP and practically none of the latter.

Simple put...why do DVD's go OOP?

Lack of demand to make it profitable to manufacture it for one.

From the Criterion FAQ:

"Why have certain Criterion titles been taken out of print? Will they ever be back in print?

All unavailable Criterion titles were taken out of print solely due to rights issues. Our distribution licenses expired and, despite our best efforts, we were unable to renew. Should Criterion ever recover the DVD rights to any of our out-of-print titles, we will surely re-release them."

Because eventually, there is only so many numbers of prints of a dvd that you can make before no one continues to buy it.

Disney has always been doing this in its VHS days to create a false demand for their product aswell as not saturate the market with it. So when they decide to re-release the film in theaters 8-10 years down the road for the new generation of kids, it will be fresh.

...because studios want you to buy the "Explosive or Deluxe Edition" of the same film in the future!

but, how can that be true? so many people would like many of the Criterion OOP titles..."The Killer", "Silence of the Lambs", "Robocop", tons would buy now. Perhaps they satiated the market back when they are first released, but you see millions of copies of no name DVD's that will sit there for years. Why can't they just produce and hope people will buy. I am sure they will. Just have them on shelves, give them the opportunity and people will buy. WE'LL BUY ANYTHING!!

My post was in addition to GHack's. Criterion falls under a different beast. They are a smaller production company compared to the big studios. So printing titles in masses would cost a lot. So factor in that the prices are higher and the general public doesn't usually buy into those certain obscure titles they treat, that is also why it seems like prints are smaller in their case. These are also titles you may not see at your local target or walmart simply because that is not the prime demographics for those films.

Less known titles just get ordered in fewer numbers. My example was towards other films that just get pressed so much and sit on the shelves (remember, store shelf space is sacred and expensive) so if a title doesn't move, they just stop ordering it. When they stop ordering it the studio presses fewer and fewer of it.

simply law of supply and demand. You also have to remember that this forum is full of film elitest. It's not the same group that will be buying or demanding of the titles that do get the masses buying.

Film distribution rights play a heavy hand in Criterions situation.

Not that anyone really cares when this happens, but another reason why some discs go out of print is when a new version is released-often the old one will go OOP. Sometimes, they will go OOP a while before the new one is released, probably to build up demand for the new release. Universal seems to do this a lot (Animal House, 12 Monkeys, Apollo 13).

To sum up ....

DVDs ... or books ... or CDs ... go out of print because:

It's a marketing strategy

or

It's a legal issue (rights)

or

Everyone who might possibly ever want to own it has bought it already and now GIGLIs are piling up in the corner.

It's also a matter of the economies of scale. You can't just do a small press run. Let's say that a company has a hundred orders for an out of print DVD, but in order to make the press run economical, they have to print a thousand copies. Sure they could sell a hundred now, but how long would it take them to sell the other nine hundred?

In the examples you give, the reason is simply because Criterion no longer holds the rights to those titles. After their rights lapsed, they could sell off the ones that were already manufactured, but they couldn't make any more. (eg. in their contract, after a certain amount of time, the rights for ROBOCOP would revert back to MGM). This is also why a bunch of Universal films that were released by Image (eg. THIS ISLAND EARTH, MST3K THE MOVIE) are OOP. Image's contract with Universal specified that they could only manufacture those DVDs for a limited period of time.

As DVDs have gotten more popular, Criterion has gotten less and less of the more popular films to release ... in their old days, they were able to get stuff like 'Robocop', or 'The Killer', because they had released the laser discs. But as DVDs have become a more viable market, the original studios don't want to give Criterion the rights, so Criterion releases more and more films which other studios are never going to want to release. Not exclusively, but many. [They still do go OOP sometimes, like 'Straw Dogs', where they had it for a limited time and then it reverted.]