petoluk wrote:If SecondRun were to finance this, and still sell the discs for £ 12.99, they'd have to sell like 15,000 copies just to get their money back (and that's not counting the production of special features, DVD authoring & manufacture, printing of covers & booklets, etc.)...
...plus marketing and physical distribution, not to mention the fact that Second Run will only get a small cut of that £12.99 once the retailers and distributors have taken their cut.
And banking on selling 15,000 copies of a UK-only release of an obscure Czech film ("obscure" in terms of recognition even among well-informed British film buffs) is total fantasy economics. Even a tenth of that figure would be considered a huge hit in this market.
The thing is, that the people involved here are trying to get a grant from the government to finance this (and once done, I guess SR, or somebody else could license the finished thing for a fraction of the above sum), but as you maybe know, after the "unsuccessful" 2006 elections, there was basically no working government for like half a year, which put the negotiations on hold.
Realistically, a government grant is the only sensible option, short of a Czech philanthropist agreeing to underwrite it. But what happens until then? Do Second Run go down the Rollotomassi-recommended route and say "Nothing but perfection will do, even if it means waiting years, if we even release it at all" (cue countless more complaints in these forums!), or adopt a more pragmatic attitude and say "OK, at least we can release a decent transfer of this important film, even if it's not going to be ideal".
There's no question which option I'd have picked - and in fact I did have to make a similar decision last year with the BFI's Jan Å vankmajer box. For various reasons largely to do with an ongoing rights dispute (one of the curses of working in this field is that there are always going to be loads of post-1989 wrangles over rights to films previously held by the Communist state), I simply couldn't get access to the original negatives of most of the films. Obviously, I'd love to have been able to do this across the board (especially as this
DVDFreak comparison of one of the cases where I was able to wangle an original-neg transfer shows just how dramatic the improvement would have been), but it just wasn't possible, and no amount of weeping and wailing would have made any difference.
So would people really have preferred the box to have been postponed indefinitely on the basis of a (probably illusory) promise of perfection across the board?
