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.
Direct to DVD
It seems that Babylon 5 creator Joe Straczynski will be making some D2DVD stories set in the B5 Universe.
Aint It Cool and Jan report on the announcement at Comic-Con.
Interestingly, neither Variety or The Hollywood Reporter have picked up on this story at the time of posting.
Some interesting points:
1) I listed Straczynski in the second tier of showrunners, those who couldn’t greenlight a D2DVD show on their own. Obviously that judgement was wrong.
The original prediction was made before the announcement of his huge spec sale to Imagine. Still, a bit of a boo-boo on my part.
2) The franchise already exists. Unlike my speculative D2DVD series, we already have pent-up demand for this – and figures to back it up. Specifically half-a-billion dollars in DVD sales. (source: the AICN report)
3) The commission is for 3 half-hours. Three half-hours plus extra features fits rather neatly on one DVD. You could even think of this as being three-pilots-in-one. So they’ve gone for a vanilla-releases model to see if the market will hold up.
Good choice.
A lot of people will be watching the progress of this with interest.
If the financial model works out, we can expect to see a lot more D2DVD series. My prediction, though, is that the other studios will wait and see how this does financially before committing to any D2DVD content themselves.