I just received the [REC] BD box set from amazon. I was getting a bit worried because while it said it was in stock it took forever for it to actually ship.

Sounds like something is going on at Shout Factory. Layoffs, fire sales.

It's all just rumors and speculation until Shout makes some kind of official announcement, if they do at all. Or if there's even anything to announce. Even though Bill Hunt says the speculation is "hype," reading his post in full isn't exactly reassuring.

But I suspect that if someone needs to fill some holes in their collection, they might want to do it sooner rather than later.

Just clicked on their website, and I noticed that some titles are showing a "Only xx left in stock" disclaimer, and others are showing as "unavailable" but with an "Email me when available" button.

I did pick up Krampus LE Steelbook and Ghosts of Mars 4K. May order Vampires 4K but that’s about it.

Unless all of this is fake hype to get us to buy more titles in fear that they’ll all be gone but in reality everything is fine.

Give a Hollywood exec the authority to downsize physical media and they'll take it every day of the week. There just isn't any profit growth left outside a handful of releases.

I think that it is more likely that Shout Factory is moving away from running their own webstore and pivoting to Gruv for that, and the sales over the last week were more to clean out their warehouse of stuff that they had that hasn't been moving or takes up space. Like the big collectors sets, those are prepackaged and ready to be shipped. The one for Robocop 2 with the 4K, posters, lobby cards, and stickers was in a box that was 5"x9"x22". You get a couple of hundred of those for each movie that they did those for, and the warehouse could fill up pretty fast, especially if the demand isn't there. It was probably more profitable to have some extreme price drops to boost sales than it would have been to ship a bunch of oversized boxes with posters and records to another warehouse for Gruv to deal with.

This is a good thing to consider with all of the smaller labels. Prioritize titles that you want and may not have been particularly good sellers, because those titles may be less likely to get repressed when current stock runs out. Like I picked up the Scream Factory disc of Raising Cain during the Shocktober sale, which came out of 2016 and still included the slipcover. That leads me to believe that it was not a great seller if they are still sitting on stock from the first 3 months of it being released (since that is the only time frame that they guarantee customers getting a slipcover).

More SF titles just dropped in price on Amazon, and one of note is Legend of Hill House, which is $8.99 and a Fox title.
I used this batch of price drops to pick up their release of The Funhouse for $9, since I only have the old Arrow white slip box edition and it is region locked.

I'm wondering if the Shout!/Scream Factory model has simply plateaued? Their niche was always 1970s/1980s horror films, which is a finite resource - they're not making any nostalgic titles anymore. Will there be a huge resurgence of fandom for "Halloween Kills" one day? Maybe?

Release 'em on DVD, Blu-ray and 4K and then what?

Add a special edition with a poster, a new steelbook? And then what?

This circumstance has been faced by all physical media - eventually everyone who wanted "Halloween" on Blu-ray or "The Eagles - Greatest Hits" CD has it already.

I suppose the current economic climate does not allow for steady, consistent (yet flat-lining) profits - only meteoric sales growth will be tolerated.

It seems like they have been more complacent over the last year and not announcing new titles, mostly reissues of older titles in steelbooks or the occasional 4K. Titles like In the Mouth of Madness, Lost in Space, Trick R Treat got blu-rays through Scream Factor but got 4Ks through Arrow. People have been speculating that they haven't been going after new licenses, but part of me wonders if they put all their efforts and money over the last year towards working out the Golden Princess deal, and if Asian films will be the focus going forward for them. None of the sales in the last week had any of their bigger anime titles for cheap and they already clearanced out the Ghibi titles that included the digibooks and soundtracks on their website over the last year, which could also point at having fewer product SKUs for another company to deal with if handling all their product, like if they do shutter their online store and move to Gruv.

GRUV is the direct-to-consumer store for Studio Distribution Services, and SDS has been distributing Shout’s titles for a while now.

I think it’s more that they already have this relationship with SDS, there’s already an infrastructure in place through GRUV, so why go through the duplicative effort of running their own store with their own staff from their own warehouse?

Which isn’t to say there’s no benefit, but they’re looking to cut head count with the recent merger, and that’s an easy place to start.

I've always thought that was a risk for Scream Factory. With the seventies and eighties horror movies, there's just not a lot of water in that particular well. That period saw a ton of such films, but only some of them are noteworthy enough to warrant a $30 special edition. And then are some films that they don't seem to able to license that would probably sell like gangbusters (like The Shining).

This would be interesting considering all the anime, Japanese TV, and the Hong Kong titles they've been doing, but would it be sustainable? I'm sure they probably need to milk that Golden Princess catalog to justify their outlay for it (even with the sub-licences surely?), but I thought it a bit odd that they pretty much started out with so many of the GP crown jewels right out of the gate, instead of interspersing them with other titles that maybe aren't as well known outside of HK fan circles. Seeing these other developments – hype or not – makes me wonder if there's a chance that major portions of the GP library will ultimately just end up on streaming, leaving us to see what Arrow or Imprint have licensed for physical discs. I just keep thinking about the words 'private equity' and how they so rarely bode well . . .

On the plus side, if things didn't work out in the long run, a lot of the stuff in Shout's catalog would seem to be suitable for reissuing by other companies (Kino, VS, Mill Creek, etc).

One asterisk is that most (all?) of the anime is from their distribution of GKIDS’ discs.

Their tokusatsu releases have really slowed down — 7 in the past 4 years, nothing on disc for a year and a half — although picking up ZEZTZ for streaming hopefully bodes well.

Shout has been doing a ton of reissues, no doubt, but we’re seeing that from basically every boutique, at least to some extent. Looking at their past couple of slates, I see a bunch of licensed titles that Shout hadn’t previously released (although it’s much sparser on the Scream Factory side than Shout Select and the like).

I wonder if the sub-licensing might play a role. Why let Arrow beat you to the punch with your own titles? And yeah, I can definitely picture a lot of these films winding up being collected in random box sets or bypassing discs altogether.

No doubt, but FWIW, Shout has been owned by private equity for several years.

Shout is a sticky wicket because it’s so different than basically every other boutique. Name a label, and there’s an excellent chance I could name at least some of its ownership and name its public-facing reps (which is ownership more often than not).

The original Scream Factory guys are gone, and there isn’t really a “face” of Shout that I could point to these days. I could rattle off the names of some execs and disc producers there, but it’s not the same thing.

They’re much larger and have their fingers in more pies than any other boutique, and physical media is just part (I’d imagine even one of the smaller parts) of what they do.

It does seem like their current ownership is very interested in amassing as much IP as possible, with all the film libraries they’ve acquired in recent years. Part of their methodology does seem to be “a little bit of money across a lot of titles and a lot of platforms = real money” — like their embrace of FAST, which isn’t exactly a high-margin business — and since they clearly seem to be into that, I wouldn’t think they’d reject physical media. But I can imagine them wanting to run the physical side of things more leanly and leverage their own library as much as possible.

There are ways around that, like how contractually most anime titles are not able to get released in 4K in the US before they get a Japanese release. But that depends on if SF included that type of clause and if Arrow and Umbrella agreed to it.

That will surely help the "Shout Factory are about to close" rumors.

Indeed. I wonder what the odds are for a similar announcement for THE KILLER or the BETTER TOMORROW trilogy. I noticed the video stores here announcing copies of the CHINESE GHOST STORY trilogy are in stock today, so at least that one seems to be a full run, but now I’m wondering if I should wait it out. I guess it’s always possible that they just underestimated the demand for HARD BOILED, but you have to wonder.

I logged onto my Shout Factory account for the first time in a while and noticed that my Wishlist was gone. I basically just used it to track things on the site I was interested in, would usually end up buying them from Amazon or some other place.

According to a reddit thread, the wishlists have been down since around the beginning of the year, so this isn't a new development.

Not talking any chance of a shortage. I ordered Hard Boiled and the Better Tomorrow trilogy off Amazon . The price isn’t ideal as a deal, but I’ll suck it up because it’s a quality set of movies.

are these HK classic sets limited editions? I find it hard to believe that Shout spent all this money on properties that have a short shelf-life. Or is it just this version of the movies that are LE, with cheaper SEs coming later?

My order from last week still hasn't shipped, so I assume their fulfillment centers are getting crushed by new orders. I guess they fired staff from that department as well?

Seems like most of their stuff just runs out of slipcovers eventually but the disc content and basic cases remain the same, so maybe they intend to have case-only ‘standard’ versions in the long run, but it’s hard to confidently guess about anything with announcements like that HARD BOILED ‘shortage’. Perhaps they genuinely underestimated the demand for that one (which really seems unlikely) and the rest will be fine? Who knows.

I think slipcovers are guaranteed for the first 3 months of a titles release, but that's it. I read somewhere that the collector's edition Blu-ray of Creepshow still comes with the thick slip box but I'm not going to order a second copy to find out for sure. But I wouldn't bet on future pressings of Hard Boiled or The Killer to include the booklets or slip boxes.