Adam Grikepelis wrote: ↑Tue Jun 02, 2020 3:59 pm
I don't know, all you need to do is look at the comments of almost every title announcement sourced from a 4K scan that has even a slightly decent audience, from numerous boutique labels on fb, to see plenty of comments complaining about the lack of a UHD release. Second Sight's
Walkabout being the most recent example I've heard of. For those fans of the format (as opposed to the films themselves), it's just the same as when Blu-Ray discs were starting out - plenty of people who suddenly don't want to buy anything but.
Sizing the real market is an absolute requirement here considering the very high oncost of UHD over BD (roughly 3-4 times), and using FB or Twitter comments as a metric can be vastly deceiving. I'd be EXTREMELY cautious when it comes to evaluating how this kind of things translates into actual sales. I think it was Le chat qui fume who had people ranting about them not releasing a certain movie. After some time, they caved in, managed to buy the rights and released it, only to do meager sales, because it turned out there weren't many people interested into buying this movie except the 60 persons who wrote those FB comments.
That's why I'm very interested in how many UHDs Vinegar Syndrome and Blue Underground have actually been selling. Especially BU who claims for Maniac and Zombi 2 "the UHDs have already done in pre-order what the new BDs have done so far total", which look insane considering they have released both already 3 times on BD (Zombi 2 having been re-released in 2018 with 3 different slipcovers, at least 1 having sold out), but also what their next titles sales will be because Maniac and Zombi 2 clearly are their cash cows and I doubt any other title will sell anything close to those 2.
black&huge wrote: ↑Wed Jun 03, 2020 2:16 am
They have a number of titles to start out with that would be potential big sellers for a somewhat mass audience: The Thin Red Line, any of the Anderson and Lynch releases, Rosemary's Baby...
Considering what I'm seeing in France, these might be "big sellers" for Criterion, but not really for mass audience. Disney/Marvel/Star Wars and big franchises like F&F can sell easily 15k+ UHDs, but when you're looking at the overall French UHD market, this means the average sale figures for everything else hovers around 1500 UHDs. That's a 10 to 1 ratio, and while obviously, some will sell a bit more than this (2-3k UHDs), this means others are selling even less than that (1000 UHDs).
1000 UHDs for a label already only selling 1000 BDs might be fine though, but finer than for a studio used to do 50k+ sales on disc, but it does mean there probably isn't any mass market appeal for these titles.