If indeed they have yet made a profit on high profile releases like those, the margin is still pretty slim. This subsidizing strategy will only last so long. Eventually, they'll have to turn a profit on all of the titles they release, or there will be no point in releasing them.

For context - top 20 DVD

1. Cloverfield
2. Juno
3. Charlie Wilson's War
4. Alvin and the Chipmunks
5. Alien vs. Predator: Requiem
6. I Am Legend
7. One Missed Call
8. The Water Horse: The Legend of the Deep
9. Enchanted
10. There Will Be Blood
11. The Orphanage
12. In the Name of the King
13. Bee Movie
13. Sweeney Todd
15. The Bourne Identity
16. No Country for Old Men
17. The Bourne Supremacy
18. 300
19. Friday Night Lights: The Second Season
20. Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story

Lots of catalog titles there as you can see.

Hey, where's The Major and the Minor?



(BTW considering the picture is about Ginger Rogers disguising herself as a schoolgirl, maybe it's NSFW according to the new rules. But I digress...)

Wasn't it released that week? And it's a Billy Wilder classic! Why isn't it on the charts??!! OMG! Universal won't release another catalog title ever!

Grubert, I will give you props for backing up what you're saying with numbers. If you don't mind me asking, are you getting these numbers from Home Media Magazine?

for someone who just piously defended himself as "playing nice" among all the meanies, you sure are laying on the mockery and sarcasm pretty thick.

personally, i agree with the sentiment that the arguments in here about sales are mostly cyclical and based on relatively small sample sizes. i think the 2008 holiday season will be a much better indicator of the future of BD than anything going on now or in the past, so i'm not yet concerned, but i'm also not yet extremely confident.

Thanks! Funnily enough, everybody asks for hard numbers but when I post them, everybody ignores them.

Home Media Magazine (print edition and website), USA Today and a couple other sources.

It's all compiled on this thread: http://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread.php?t=23417

Thanks for addressing the tone of one of my messages and totally disregarding its substance (to wit, that catalog titles don't sell a lot, be them on DVD or BD), as well as ignoring the substance of each and every one of the other informative posts I have written.

Unit sales in Q1 2007 were 832,000. Unit sales in Q1 2008 were 3,800,000. Is that a small sample?

I expect 10-15 million units sold in Q4.

It's got nothing to do with being defensive -it's got to do with being accurate. Otherwise why bother discussing this stuff?

you're very welcome!

Yes. A single quarter of sales this early in the format, particularly this early in the post-war era, is a small sample. That's what I would call an expected amount of growth, especially considering overall HDM growth ocurred at about the same rate between those two quarters, even with the death of HD DVD. As I said, I'm not discouraged at all, but we need more time to give us a clearer indication of what exactly the future of BD holds.

Here's the difference, as you well know. While the Top 20 DVD list may be dominated by day-and-date releases, titles below the Top 20 still sell a large number of copies. With Blu-ray, however, even within the Top 10 list the numbers dwindle down towards nothing at the bottom. For a title to not make the Top 20 Blu-ray list means that it likely sold almost no copies at all.

You can try to spin this all you want with rankings and percentages, but the fact remains that catalog titles don't sell on Blu-ray. That is not a trend that can last forever. Either there will need to be a significant upswing in sales, or we can say goodbye to future catalog titles on the format.

One of my dimmer friends recently tried to invest in a get-rich-quick scheme involving buying a large lot of umbrellas cheaply and selling them on a street corner for a higher markup. He bought 5,000 umbrellas at $1 a piece, for an investment of $5,000. He priced them at $5 a piece, and fully expected to make $25,000 in sales (minus the original $5k investment, for a profit of $20k).

Unfortunately, my friend is a lousy salesman and just plain lazy. In fact, he doesn't like to go out to his booth on the street corner when it's raining. He will only stand out there selling umbrellas on dry days. You can imagine how well this plan has worked for him.

In the first month, my friend sold 3 umbrellas, for an income of $15.

In the second month, there was a mildly overcast week in which he sold 9 umbrellas ($45) despite packing it in and going home early every day (he wanted to avoid the rain, of course).

With these numbers, my friend has demonstrated a 200% positive sales growth from month to month.

By your estimation, would you say that my friend's business has been successful?

Your analogy only serves to illustrate why your "dim" friend and you have so much in common.

That's really unnecessary.

Let's try and maintain an ounce or two of civility, shall we?

Josh, I can totally see your point, and I would agree if Blu-ray disc sales just suddenly plateaued right where they are. They aren't doing that, though. It's been demonstrated that they are be trending upward, and the studios are going to -- if not now then eventually -- be seeing some profits from Blu-ray sales. Lionsgate, in fact, reports that they're already making $15 per unit on BD sales. Also, if you're a subscriber to the notion that the studios have accepted bribes/incentives/whatever to back and produce Blu-ray discs, they're going to continue to back and produce Blu-ray discs for as long as they are contractually obligated, whether or not those discs ever turn any kind of profit for them.

I think my video store analogy still stands. The studios are going to release movies -- a wide variety of movies -- if only to provide consumers with a choice. Weaker selling titles will be subsidized by stronger selling titles: just like it was with Laserdisc, just like it has been with DVD and just like it is at the Box Office.

Just look how much absolute crap continues to get pressed onto DVD, whether or not anybody ever buys it!

Zapped! On DVD probably sold better then 90% if BR catalog titles.

I update my ps3 firmware more times than the # of Zapped! dvd sales.

And I'm sure there would've been any number of VHS titles which would've outsold it had it been released back in 1998 . . .

I appreciate your making a cogent argument, and not just reiterating the same talking points rehashed over and over again in this thread. However, I disagree that this subsidizing strategy can last much longer. Perhaps if the top titles were selling millions of copies, or anywhere near decent DVD numbers. But with best sellers barely scraping 100,000 units, I doubt the studios are making much profit at all, much less enough to justify subsidizing everything else they release.

And I guarantee you that the BDA incentive packages dried up the moment Toshiba threw in the towel and ended the format war.

If things don't turn around after this coming holiday season, I expect that we'll see some major changes to the studios' release strategies. This is a case where I'd love to be proven wrong, but we'll see...

It just seems like nobody ever buys it, in relative terms. There are still way more people buying the absolute bottom-of-the-barrel crap on DVD than buy even the prestige titles on Blu-ray.

What are production costs on a BD? I'm sure it's been covered but I can't seem to find it.

Without reading the specific terms of any "incentive" contracts between the BDA and studios and/or hardware manufacturers, there is no possible way you can make such a guarantee. Therefore, logic dictates that you are engaging in hyperbole.

Do you really think that anyone disagrees with you on this? The point of contention in this thread is the way some people are jumping to a conclusion that cannot be predicted at this extremely early stage. The coming holiday season is still six months away. It seems that some people have already forgotten just how much things can change in six months.

There are wildly illogical extrapolations on display "proving" the ill-health of the Blu-ray format that we are just supposed to accept at face value. Well, sorry, but I don't accept them.

I definitely agree that if studios don't see some returns on their investment, there are going to be some potentially ugly changes ahead. To an extent, I think the studios have really shot themselves in the foot by having double and triple-dipped with past releases, and people are tired of buying the same movie multiple times. But I'll bet we can probably also agree that it's still much too early in the game for people to be so despairing and gloomy. Let's give it another year.

No. Your friend's breakeven point was at 1,250 umbrellas.

What's the breakeven point for BD?

DVD user base: 130+ million US players

BD user base: 5 million US players

I guess it probably should have.

any opinions?

You tell me. You seem to be the guy good at getting all the numbers.

I bet ya that those 8,000 copies of Predator didn't hit that break-even point, though. How many copies were manufactured and distributed to retail?

Oh, I agree completely. Much of this is the studios' own damn fault for devaluing home video media with their incessant double-dipping and instant bargain bin price drops. They then in turn over-priced Blu-ray without giving consumers enough of a perceived added value. Why would a shopper want to pay $39.98 for a bare-bones edition of the 1987 Predator when they can find the fully-loaded Collector's Edition DVD for $5 in the same store's bargain aisle?

Here's the problem. Giving it another year will be too late. The studios need to change their release and marketing strategies right now if they expect things to turn around by the end of the year. If they sit on their hands and say, "Oh we'll just wait and see how it plays out this holiday season", they're going to find not much changed. And without a dramatic increase in sales, they'll drop their output next year in response.

Now is the time for action, not 6 or 12 months from now. Hoping for the best without making a substantial concerted effort to bring in new customers is what HD DVD did, and now it's gone.