Will there ever be a market for a D2DVD series?


Yesterday, the first disc of the new D2DVD Babylon 5 series was made available to pre-order on Amazon US.

At the time of this writing they are #6 in the Amazon US sales chart.

So I guess that answers that question, then.


6 responses to “Will there ever be a market for a D2DVD series?”

  1. Isn’t there something about Amazon’s sales rankings being more complicated than a straight chart of how many they’ve shifted?

    I imagine you know this better than I do, even if I were feeling clearer this afternoon, but I’ve a nagging memory of it being a combination of sales, pre-orders, how much the figures have changed since yesterday or something.

    I just remember Ed Reardon’s Week having a scene proving Ed’s exciting Amazon figure amounted to nothing.

    William

  2. While it isn’t an exact assessment, the rise of a D2DVD title like this on Amazon’s charts is a “healthy indicator of audience interest.”

    We also have to factor in the fact that new releases will spur sales for the series sets that are already in stock and on the shelf. This is the reason that Fox allowed Universal to finance a FIREFLY movie – they could leech off the movie to spur their Firefly set sales (which were an indicator to Universal that a low budget movie was viable).

    These B5 movies and the upcoming STARGATE and BATTLESTAR GALACTICA entries will be a good spur to the horse’s flanks for D2DVD series being developed and produced.

    I for one would like to find older properties and resurrect them for new audiences. A D2DVD mini or feature movie would be an economical way to divine whether or not a new longer-term series should be produced.

  3. To get the commentary flowing:

    How about a couple of DOCTOR WHO or SPOOKS or HUSTLE D2DVD movies?

    Maybe a movie at the end of the season (while the crew is still around) reusing the props and other items from the series (available cheap) and adding in some guest faces.

    At the end of the series a movie comes out on DVD. Some elements of the movie will affect the forthcoming series…

  4. Well, the Doctor Who team is already doing this in the form of a Christmas Special. But they’ll never go D2DVD – as an internally-commissioned show it’s far more important to use that extra show to boost ratings on BBC1.

    Spooks and Hustle are made by Kudos, an external company – so that’s a possibility, if the rights situation would allow it.

    Assuming we can get around any rights issues, would it sell enough copies to break even? My impression is that you’d need to sell into the US market for this to work.

    Gedankenexperiment: Assume for the sake of argument that Spooks/Hustle are at the mid-point of Drama 5, and are tariffed at 750k/hour. Up that by 50% for our mooted D2DVD film, and we’re getting 113k per episode, and assuming that Kudos is making a profit on that amount of money.

    Let’s presume that they get 50% of the RRP, and we’ll price it at 15 quid. (RRP of a Season 3 box-set on Amazon right now in 30 quid for six hours, so that’s already a bit steep, but let’s assume this is going to be an event.)

    What they’d need to do, then, is sell (113,000 pounds divided by 7.50 money-to-Kudos per unit) call it 15,000 units.

    I have found it almost impossible to get DVD sales information (annoyingly, there were some figures in an ad in Variety recently blowing someone’s own trumpet – but I’ve lost the edition in question), so I don’t know how feasible this is.

    If US sales were factored in… maybe.

    If anyone’s got better data, let’s have it!

  5. Well of course you would sell it to the US. You would sell it to the world! Distributors would acquire it as a tease for those people who may not regularly get the tv sets. “Like the D2DVD movie? Well here, get the series.”

    15,000 units is not a lot at all. A Full Moon movie gets 15k unit sales.

    Done.

    Then, backtrack and screen the movie on BBC 1 before the next series starts.

    Double win.

  6. Seems that Spooks and Hustle will indeed be going to DVD.

    As an aftermarket on a theatrical release.

    Variety has the news if you have a subscription.

    Excerpt:

    “A bigscreen version of “Hustle,” about a team of con artists, being developed by Tony Jordan, writer of the original show, for Fox 2000. Paula Weinstein is working on a movie for Warner based on Nalluri’s epic “Tsunami,” which Kudos produced for HBO and the BBC. The company is also about to embark on development of a movie script based on spy drama “Spooks.””

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