HauntedMansionFLA
Well-Known Member
Wasn't Disney rumored to be interested awhile back in Time Warner?
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A Spirited Dirty Dozen ...
- Thread starter WDW1974
- Start date
Quinnmac000
Well-Known Member
I know there was rumours Comcast was looking at the land but wouldn't be suprised.
Animaniac93-98
Well-Known Member
When looking at stats for another thread I thought it was interesting to see what Disney movie made the top 5 best selling home media titles two weeks in a row, despite little to no marketing on the company's part outside of some e-newsletters and flyer snippets for its home video Reward and Club members.
Top Five Home Media Sellers for Week Ending 10/16/16 (% of Blu-ray's Market Share Noted):
Still, for all of their pushing of PRINCESSES, MARVEL & STAR WARS, it makes me laugh a bit to know that sometimes what people really want from Disney is Bette Middler camping it up as a witch. The BOD must be puzzled by this franchise outlier.
Top Five Home Media Sellers for Week Ending 10/16/16 (% of Blu-ray's Market Share Noted):
- Ghostbusters (50%)
- The Legend of Tarzan (46%)
- Ice Age: Collision Course (43%)
- X-Men: Apocalypse (60%)
- Hocus Pocus (21%)
- X-Men: Apocalypse (67%)
- The Purge: Election Year (51%)
- Central Intelligence (38%)
- Warcraft (65%)
- Hocus Pocus (17%)
Still, for all of their pushing of PRINCESSES, MARVEL & STAR WARS, it makes me laugh a bit to know that sometimes what people really want from Disney is Bette Middler camping it up as a witch. The BOD must be puzzled by this franchise outlier.
71jason
Well-Known Member
There's a great irony here: TWDC spent billions on turning Orlando into a "blue ocean" market. In the process, they allowed their #1 competitor to grow stronger than anyone possibly imagined it could (water park, 10k rooms and a third gate on the way), and now appear to have attracted another major player who sees weakness in the WDW model. Unthinkable a decade ago.
All that money and effort, Disney only succeeded in making the Orlando theme park ocean "redder" than it ever was.
AEfx
Well-Known Member
And before that there were rumors once upon a time that TW wanted to buy Disney.
AEfx
Well-Known Member
I don't think that's really true - it's actually easier than ever today to watch older and classic programming.
It's called streaming.
As a physical media person, even I have to admit that the amount of people consuming it has gone down considerably. While the big new movies sell pretty well, once you get out of the top few, you would be shocked how easy it is and how few copies it takes to sell to chart these days. And in spite of that, more titles have been sold in the still viable DVD format than ever were available on VHS.
And then, again, is streaming. Where you can see a mind boggling amount of past movies and TV shows available at a (legal!) click away. Things that absolutely never came out on VHS and many that didn't make it to DVD even. Entire runs of TV shows that in this fabulous past you talk about were only available if a TV station committed to paying the syndication fees (and often were pulled before they even finished a repeat run which you only could see anyway if you were there every day at 2am or whenever they would run it).
Streaming is also a holiday-filled source as well. Right now both Netflix and Hulu have curated lists of all the Halloween stuff you could want. They will do the same for Christmas as they always do.
While streaming has its own issues (many forthcoming once ISPs in the US flip on the data caps they are itching to do) at the moment, one can enjoy more past media more easily than it ever has been since the invention of filmed entertainment.
Animaniac93-98
Well-Known Member
Go back a few pages and read the article linked by @the.dreamfinder regarding the new streaming service FilmStruck. It goes into great detail about how streaming is not the best outlet to find older movies, and how the incentive for the current generation to seek them out is not what it used to be.
A 90s cataloge title like Hocus Pocus doesn't have that issue (yet), but you'd be surprised what titles are NOT available on services like Netflix and Hulu.
AEfx
Well-Known Member
No, I wouldn't be surprised. It's hardly everything ever made. Which is why it has been supplemented by specialized services like TCM's, or existing DVD, and Bluray.
But as someone who grew up during the age when all we had was TV and VHS, I'm amazed at how much more is available now. It's unquestionable that older media is more available than ever, particularly when it comes to television content. I remember reading books about TV history back then and realizing that there was no way I'd ever see any of those shows. Now thanks to DVD and streaming, I honestly can say I've seen just about everything I've ever wanted.
I think the issue you are seeing actually has more to do with the sheer amount of content period. Sure you can find gaps, but I think a large part of that problem is really as time goes on, more content is being churned out. Imagine what it's going to be in, say, 2050. When you have a 100 years of TV and nearly 150 years of movies that have been made. Some of it is going to fall away because frankly, people just aren't going to live long enough to slog through but a tiny percentage of it. You are forgetting that during the VHS age, we only had a few decades of content to "catch up on" - far different than even today, much less tomorrow.
Animaniac93-98
Well-Known Member
I don't disagree with what you say, but I will clarify on the "incentive" point I made before based on my own anecdotal experience.
Not too long ago, for some movies like Hocus Pocus or the Rankin Bass specials, the only way to way to watch them was on TV, and only at a specific time of the year. If you didn't catch a broadcast on some network, you'd have to wait another year before you could try again. That's why even if you couldn't remember the name or watch it from the start you'd at least try to do so and catch what you could. It became a annual game of sorts, and one you'd make an effort to do.
Now with streaming there's no urgency because you can pull it up whenever you want. It's not an event anymore, for this or any other movie (going back to the days when something like Camelot would be split over two nights). That's something both positive (ease of access) and negative (lack of advertising or network push) for back cataloge films.
AEfx
Well-Known Member
Oh absolutely.
The landscape has changed. It's like the music industry - no one is ever going to outsell Thriller, the market just has changed so much it's pretty much a mathematical impossibility.
Conversely, though, I see more kids today seeking out the media of the past generation more than most of my peers did when I was a kid except for past sitcoms (which were endlessly rerun in the 1980's due to lack of syndication content). Part of it is availability, part of it is the Internet and YouTube (which is invaluable for those who care about past entertainment). A kid can see Michael Cain as Alfred in Batman, and then look him up on the Internet and see he's had a 40 year career to explore.
Even when you talk about WWII era cinema, Warner Archive, etc has been really great the last few years in getting even a lot of that stuff out there. It's not as easy to get on streaming, but if you look it's available on Amazon, your local library, etc.
While I too romanticize the days when everyone at school was excited because Wizard of Oz was getting its yearly airing, it's something that ironically Netflix is closest to replicating with its original programming. Look at what a cultural phenomenon Stranger Things was this summer. While I believe Social Media is in some ways very destructive, one of the positives is in things like that - where instead of a network dictating what we are all talking about watching, it's really crowd sourced - and no more "well you can catch up in rerun season" when you can binge it right now.
Cesar R M
Well-Known Member
My boss will be very angry to see the artegnon disappear. She used to sell her art wares there.
The Empress Lilly
Well-Known Member
My first thought was that they are going to pull a Hobbit.
But from what I understand J.K. Rowling will be personally involved, even screenwriting, so that should ensure great quality control.
If it catches on it might not only prolong the Potter franchise, but create an entirely new one. Same wizard universe, new world, new characters. Could anchor the new UNI park with a land.
MonkeyHead
Well-Known Member
The Hobbit was one small story stretched out endlessly over three movies. Fantastic Beasts is just named after a small zoological textbook with nothing in common with the film other than the name of the book, some of the creatures discussed and its "author."
Rowling could do a dozen movies if she wanted and thought it served the story since it's all new material.
Rowling could do a dozen movies if she wanted and thought it served the story since it's all new material.
HauntedMansionFLA
Well-Known Member
Disney should look at this example to regards to Star Wars. There is a whole SW Universe out there that they haven't started to touch. They should start to look at content outside the world of the Skywalkers.lots of interesting story lines they could dive into.
lazyboy97o
Well-Known Member
Rougue One and the other Star Wars Story films are supposed to fill that role.
The Empress Lilly
Well-Known Member
I started watching Clone Wars last year. Yes, late to the party.
I expected it to be slightly mediocre, but it is really rather good, increasingly so with each season.
Star Wars is more than one family with severe hereditary mental illness.
ford91exploder
Resident Curmudgeon
Actually they did not make Orlando a 'Blue Ocean', They deluded themselves into Disney is number one and no one can compete and ignored their competition If Disney had CONTINUED to build they could have indeed made WDW 'Blue Ocean' but they did not do so. DCL and DVC were at the time and still are 'Blue Ocean' new innovative and almost impossible to copy.
Letting a classic theme park get stale and strip mining it for cash is not 'Blue Ocean' it's vulture capitalism at it's worst. Now UNI has a 10 year lead on building new attractions and they are putting new E-tickets online at once every 18 months or so what COULD have been 'Blue Ocean' is now as you say redder than ever.
HauntedMansionFLA
Well-Known Member
And before that Comcast made that hostile takeover bid for Disney
71jason
Well-Known Member
Well, tried to. That was the goal. But we agree they failed, and had the opposite effect.
But Disney is a business...