Direct to DVD = Direct to the Bank

By Matt Wedge

November 14, 2007 1:00 AM Permalink Comments (1)

Would you throw out your golden goose?

What did audiences think of The Dukes of Hazard: The Beginning? Did they like Beethoven’s 3rd or 4th? Mimic 2? Hollow Man II? If no one recalls these sequels making their way to the local theater, that’s because they didn’t. They are DVD premieres that were produced specifically for the home video market, a trend gaining in legitimacy as they maintain an impressive level of consistent profitability.

This practice can be traced back to the early nineties when Disney and Universal started to issue direct-to-video sequels to their animated hits. The Return of Jafar, a sequel to Aladdin, hit video shelves in 1994. The built-in audience of families with young children snatched it up and a viable new market was off and running. Since then, Disney has turned out sequels to everything from Cinderella to Lilo & Stitch. Universal jumped in the same year with their first sequel to The Land Before Time. The studio has since released ten more sequels in the franchise.

Despite the immediate financial success of the Disney and Universal sequels, it still took years before other studios followed suit. It was the horror genre that first recognized the potential to tap their own core audience to keep profitable franchises going without putting a ton of money into them. The Hellraiser films have had five direct-to-DVD sequels. Species spawned a theatrical sequel and two direct-to-DVD follow-ups. The Crow managed a theatrical sequel, two direct-to-DVD installments and a short-lived syndicated TV show. Even the forgettable 2003 horror, Wrong Turn, managed to spawn a DVD sequel.

While there are obvious benefits of going this route for the horror and family genres, why bother making a low-budget sequel to films like The Dukes of Hazard that only did so-so business? What about the American Pie or K-9 franchises? Why are there sequels to films that ran out of box office steam several years ago?

The easy, and correct, answer is money. A name-brand property is a potential profit source for any producer willing to put a small budget -- averaging around $5 million -- into a sequel. Freed from the expensive costs of prints, marketing, and a name cast, the results are low-risk films that take next to no time to turn a profit. Look at American Pie Presents Band Camp. In its first week it sold over a million copies and landed number one on the DVD sales chart.

By raiding their own vaults for sequels, studios also keep past hits in the public consciousness, improving rentals and sales of those older titles. This is to say nothing of the income brought in through other media including TV shows and video games.

While Disney, Sony, Universal, and the Weinstein brothers, via their genre arm, Dimension, have been enjoying the fruits of this practice for more than a decade, Paramount and Warner Brothers have recently entered the fray, starting their own production arms for direct-to-DVD sequels. With this much upside, there has to be a catch, right?

The catch is that the movies themselves just are not very good. Most pass muster as merely mediocre. While the production value is there and they’re competently put together, most of the films suffer creatively due to the lack of talent behind and in front of the camera. This in itself is not surprising. With the small budgets these films are running, the producers have to rely on a combination of young directors, untested screenwriters, and a cast of newcomers and veteran B-movie actors. Occasionally, this fresh talent can work out well. The Wrong Turn sequel, subtitled Dead End, has been praised as being more entertaining than its theatrical precursor. But more often than not, the results play exactly as one might expect: a low-budget retread, not good enough for theatrical-release budgeting.

While this practice has become routine among other studios, Disney, the studio that helped start the trend, is now bucking it. One of the first moves that John Lasseter made when taking over Disney animation was to put a stop to the studio’s practice of direct-to-DVD sequels, decrying their inferior quality and storytelling. While this move can be seen as creatively courageous, you could almost hear the Disney stockholders cry, “No!” in unison.

Despite the efforts of Lasseter to put quality over an easy buck, the other studios are most definitely not following suit. The fact remains that consumers keep purchasing and renting these titles, generating no incentive for the studios to invest more money or time into making them better.

In the end, who can blame the studios? They have discovered a way to practically print money by taking advantage of the booming DVD market. It only makes good business sense to continue the practice until consumers get burned one too many times by inferior product. Where will they turn then for their entertainment choices?

1 Comments

Lyle Holmes said:

I come from the video industry and the challenge now is that the DVD market is saturated with product. It takes name recognition to breakout of the pack and off the shelf. So, shlock-movie IV is usually a better gamble for the retailer than the unknown indie project. That's not a universal statement, but it is a pretty fair generalization of the way retailers and rentailers approach the industry. In the end both the consumer and indie filmmaker lose out.

Lyle Holmes Editor-in-Chief Boxoffice.com

http://boxoffice.com/distribution/2007/11/direct-to-dvd-direct-to-the-ba.php