SUPERMANROB

Well in my opinion,the only people we can blame for the prices are us, the consumer.We keep buying these movies at these prices, so why would they drop the prices.HD-DVD going down didnt help. With no one to compete with now,I would think they will leave prices where they are or even raise them a little(on disc & players). It's a business, if we buy them at these prices,why not(for them).

For me, I'm not going BD till I can buy a player for what I got my A35 for($149). In the mean time my A35 does a great job with upconverting . There is no movie I need to see for me to go out and buy a BD player for $500 and up(since I would want it to output lossless audio like my A35).
Ok I might for The Lord of The Ring Trilogy , maybe. just my two cents

The Cow

I tried to cover that in my post #11. But more words are good.

Gizmo

I don't buy titles if the price is to high. I passed on ID4 and I, Robot due to the high prices. Its no longer an "impulse" buy to me. If I saw these for $19.99 at Best Buy, I'd grab both, even with the lack of extras. However they are $34.99 with, if lucky, 1/5th the extras present on the SD version(s), and simply not worth my money.

The only Fox title I have purchased Day and Date was X-Men III, and even then it was months after the SD version but still a new release to Blu-ray. Every other Fox title was purchased via BOGO or sale on Amazon.

tomty57

The name of the game is patience!!! I'll light myself on fire before I pay $35 for any dvd. I have the standard versions and a great upconvert and they will suffice until these prices come down. I would bet I can get I Robot and Independance Day on ebay in a month or two for significantly less. I'm also not too proud to buy a used copy (thank God for the scratch resistance coating on the blu ray). Luckily, Amazon had a great sale on I Am Legend. I have no problem spending $18 for a blu ray. Once again, no one says you need to go out and buy it on the release date.

PopcornTreeCt

I ordered ID4 from Amazon back when it was supposed to be released and the price was $23.95. Dropping $27.95 or more for Blu-rays are ridiculous.

Rusty James

Exactly. Why should Fox just sell you a movie once, when they can sell it to you three times? Ka-ching!

GreenMonkey

We need a "Fox's latest Blu-ray shenanigans" thread.

People need to stop buying the releases with stripped off features if they care at all about them. One of the reasons I own so few blu-rays is that Fox is the worst studio for this. Sony/Columbia has been getting better at not doing this lately (they were another offender), but Fox hasn't improved at all.

Fox's upcoming Master and Commander disc has 4 deleted scenes and the trailer, everything else is gone. I had sold my single disc DVD last year in prep for the BD release (I wasn't onto Fox yet).
After reading it was a stripped down BD, AGAIN, I just picked up the 2-disc SE used for cheap. Fox can bite me.

JimRochester

More fuel for what I said in the "I'm not impressed" thread. I do see a difference in the HD discs, but if I've already got a good SE version, I may be gaining nothing and in many cases losing something by "upgrading". I picked up BD of Pearl Harbor then saw it was just the PG13 version. I already have the 4 disc SE with DTS and the longer R rated cut which I preferred. ID4, Die Hard 4, Pearl Harbor, the list gets longer for inferior versions coming to Hi Def. I have way too many movies and way too limited an income to "upgrade" everything they throw at me. I have a nice 5* version which will hold me over.

12cm

Here's my opinion...

Fox and the other studios that do this are screwing themselves more than us with this kind of tactic. I really don't think it's just so they can sell us the movie again, I think it's that they don't have to sell as many copies and still make a hefty profit if they don't spend the extra dough on fancy authoring, a second disc, a BD-50, or whatever. The reason I say they're screwing themselves is that it blows the whole "Blu-ray is better" thing right out of the water. Joe Six-Pack isn't gonna understand that hi-def footage takes up tons more space... he'll just see a DVD with lots of bonus material and a Blu-ray with just the movie, and wonder why the format that's supposed to hold six times more data only has the movie.

Of course Joe Six-Pack is usually only interested in the movie, so maybe I'm wrong there. It certainly doesn't offer much of an incentive to upgrade when the "better" version has less to offer. PQ can only go so far. I was disappointed to find out the BD had neither the extended cut nor bonus material, but I'm kind of getting used to that. I'm looking at Blu-ray kind of like Sony's Superbit discs... they don't replace the regular version, it's just a nice picture and better sound. There's enough of a difference with Blu-ray for me to justify buying them even though the old DVD has more bonus stuff.

What will probably really happen is that Blu-ray will become the next Laserdisc. LD and VHS coexisted for a long time... people who were really serious about movies bought the LD, but it didn't mean VHS was dead. Back then of course, it was the LD that had more bonus material AND better PQ, so this is a little different. I still think Blu-ray can hang on against standard DVD just because there's so much difference between SD and HD. I only have a 720p TV, but Blu-ray still looks slightly better. ID4 is a pretty grainy movie, but I'll take film grain over macroblocking any day.

I'm not necessarily betting on Blu-ray for the long haul, but if it ever dies, my discs will still work, and they'll still be hi-def. There have been enough players made that I should always be able to find one, and they don't have to phone home like DIVX players did, so they won't become doorstops like DIVX players are now. Speaking of DIVX, it worries me that Profile 2.0 is apparently a largely online thing... stuff like DIVX, WebTV, and lots of other online-dependent things didn't have a bright future when standards changed. For that reason, I'm happy with my non-Ethernet BDP-S300.

Enough catalog titles are coming out that haven't been on a hi-def format yet (movies that used to be exclusive to HD-DVD don't impress me since the transfer is already done), so the studios are obviously putting some effort into Blu-ray (erm... except Fox). To me that means by the time the format dies, we should have BD-ROM drives in computers, cheaper set-top units, and probably even portable players. I wouldn't care if it all came to an end, as long as I could still play the movies I have.

Don't get me wrong though, if a new hi-def format emerged and killed Blu-ray, I'm sure I'd eventually switch over and if I could re-buy all the movies on a new format that I had on Blu-ray, I'd do it (guess I'm one of the dumb sheep the studios and hardware manufacturers count on), but I'd have to keep any discs that had stuff the new format didn't offer, which is what I'm doing with my DVDs. The main disappointment of ID4 is that it doesn't completely replace my Five-Star DVD set, and it was disappointing that I, Robot didn't include the featurette from the standard DVD release, but the important thing is getting the movie in high-def.

It's also a space issue for me... every DVD I can replace with a BD, even if it's only Disc 1 like with ICE AGE, the better. I'll always have DVDs that a Blu-ray release will never make obsolete, just like I have Laserdiscs, VHS and Beta tapes that no DVD release has made obsolete. As long as that remains the case, I'll replace stuff any time I can. I won't go without bonus features, but I don't want to miss out on high-def transfers either. Thankfully I'm not a fan of the Matrix films, so there really isn't a "killer app" movie that is only on HD-DVD, but there are at least a half-dozen titles on HD-DVD that it would bother me if they never made it to Blu-ray. I was pretty close to buying an HD-DVD player before the format war ended, but I decided against it. If I have to sacrifice hi-def transfers of Billy Madison, Ray, Fletch, etc., so be it.

argh923

All these people quoting $35 for blu-rays make me wonder where the hell they're shopping at.

Lt Ripley

No shit!


I am mad at Fox because they haven't released Alien yet. Shortly both piece of shit AVP movies will be released, yet no Alien (Nor Aliens for that matter.) WTF?

We got The Fly.
We got Predator (Within a month).

I can see Predator outselling Alien, but The Fly?

I don't care about extras, I got em on the Quad set. The only extras that I would EVER care about being in HD are deleted scenes. I don't want that fake ass Director's cut they came out with a few years ago. Just give me the original theatrical cut with high def audio.

Come on Fox, you released Alien on UMD and D-VHS for crying out loud. Give me my drug!!

Mr. Cinema

Sadly, the leading seller of HD media is Best Buy, who sells almost all Fox titles at $34.99. They also have sticker prices of $34.99 on titles like Assassination of Jesse James, and others.

Vipper II

Not everyone buys movies from the internets; they go to places like Best Buy and Circuit City, both of which charge only a few bucks less than list price, plus tax.

Viper187

The studios screwing up so bad pisses me off, bu tit also saves me money, since I refuse to double dip anything I can't get the version I want of. Anyone know wha tthe plans are for Commando next month? They just released the damn extended cut, so you'd think that'd be on the BD.

And why the hell does everyone cheer for the theatrical of ID4, but nobody seems to care about Payback? Paramount fucked us there. I want the theatrical cut of that in hi-def, and I want it bad. The director's cut was so different it's unreal. The syndicate boss isn't even played by the same person!!

Lt Ripley

But they are astute enough to use this forum, thus knowing that the prices are much cheaper elsewhere.

beebs

Fox has been largely releasing their top box office grossing movies on HD. I expect the following (or most of them) at some point in the next 18 months: Home Alone, Something About Mary, True Lies, Sound of Music, Minority Report, Borat, Walk the Line, Big Momma's House, Big, Dodgeball, Rocky Horror Picture Show, Porky's, 9 to 5, Daredevil, and Sleeping with the Enemy.

Star Wars is their biggest franchise, but I think it is dreaming to think we'll see this before 50 million Blu-Ray players are sold.

The Alien franchise seems like a big seller on DVD (close to $400 million for 6 movies on the big screen, too), but somehow not a single movie is in the top 400 top grossing domestic movies. (Aliens hit 82.5 Million). I wouldn't be surprised if they are keeping it for next year, though. (I'd love the first two on HD right now, barebones or not.)

-beebs

Viper187

Why? Star Wars would sell a lot more players than the shit they're releasing right now.

Mr. Cinema

Next year will be Alien's 30th Anniversary. I believe both Alien and Aliens are on the schedule and may debut in Q4 or next year.

Fox is releasing a dvd of Walk the Line: Extended Cut on 3/25. Seems like that would've been the best time to release a BD. Also, I think there are still several Fox/MGM BDs that were delayed last year that we still haven't heard a peep about since. Dodgeball, Silence of the Lambs, Turistas, Dances With Wolves, Hannibal, The Princess Bride, among others.

Drexl

I think Minority Report would be distributed by Paramount now. It was a Dreamworks co-production that was initially released by Dreamworks. That may be different overseas though.

waylonsmithers

George Lucas calls the shots on Star Wars releases, not Fox.

Alan Smithee

Fox was overpricing their regular DVDs in the beginning too- $35 for 4x3 letterbox transfers and usually no extras. They finally came around after a couple years. We'll still have to see what happens with Blu-Ray.

12cm

Two words... instant gratification. You can't just count the dollars and cents. Getting the thing right away and knowing it's in good condition is worth the extra bucks to many people... so is driving across town to return it instead of boxing it up and shipping it.

Lt Ripley

Saving $10 is well worth the risk of a damaged case. I don't watch the case. I watch the film.

bunkaroo

WARNING - personal anecdote:

I've ordered at least 200 HDM discs from Amazon since 2006. Even with their questionable shipping practices (boxes too big, loose in the box, etc.), I have had maybe 4-5 floaters (this can easily happen in store as well), and I've had 1-2 cracked cases.

I'd wager I've saved well over $1000 by shopping online for my collection.

Viper187

Whenever I shop in stores, I try to always shake any movie I intend to buy in order to check for floaters. Snapcases are a little harder to tell with though, IMO.