r/movies • u/Educational_Metal_47 • 11h ago
Discussion Was there really a fear in the movie theater business in the 80s that VHS/VCR would kill the theater business?
Was there genuine fear in the movie theater business that VHS/VCRs would kill the movie theater or moviegoing business? In the 1980s the technology — which allowed users to watch prerecorded videocassettes or make home recordings of TV broadcasts — was being adopted by an estimated 1 million households per month in North America. That’s per month that’s a lot. Also similarly people in the 50s that the medium of TVs would kill theaters. I’m genuinely asking this question because with today with streaming a lot of people think or seem to believe movie theaters are dead or dying or are gonna go extinct due to streaming what do you think?
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u/bourj 11h ago
The bigger fear was losing advertising money due to being able to skip commercials.
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u/IndividualistAW 11h ago
A battle fought all over again in the early 2000s with tivo
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u/Woodie626 10h ago
Doing it rn with YouTube
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u/nullv 8h ago
They're winning now. Firefox has bled too many users, they lack funding, and Chrome is big enough to remove uBlock without any blowback.
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u/thatshygirl06 7h ago
It's not winning against adguard. It's the best ad blocker I've ever used. It even works on streaming services.
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u/nasnedigonyat 9h ago
And again now w Netfux and the other streaming douche brothers who enshittified streaming for shareholders
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u/belunos 10h ago
Yea, that's how I remember it. I don't recall hearing about fear from theaters
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u/Woodie626 10h ago
You wouldn't download a bear
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u/BattlinBud 9h ago
Years ago I saw someone post a pic that said "you wouldn't download a butt" in that text and I think about that stupid joke at least once a month
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u/DudesworthMannington 10h ago
It's basically the same fear that illegal streaming sites will kill movies/TV Shows today. They won't, but it's still their talking point.
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u/Ok_Win8049 11h ago
Can't speak for the US, but I can say what my parents thought at the time: There really wasn't a fear for the theater business as VHS/VCRs were pretty damn expensive so fewer people actually had them. Even if someone had it, they would own at best 10-15 movies that were already out for a couple of years (or decades) at this point. Streaming is definitely hurting the industry by killing the DVD release. There's a clip of Matt Damon, he explains this well.
But it might not be as damning as the incredibly short release window between a theatrical and streaming release. There are of course other problems, but as far as streaming is concerned...I don't know what the solution is. Maybe they can try what we have in gaming, like purchasing a game on a platform like Steam (pseudo-ownership I know), and apply the same logic to purchasing a movie on your Netflix account. But only make it available after a 6-12 months from the theatrical run. Make it work like the DVD.
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u/AwesomePossum_1 10h ago
Renting them wasn't expensive though. And in some ways it's even worse than streaming. Studios get nothing at all from customers watching their films.
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u/Sword_Thain 6h ago
Rental places had to buy the rental tapes which started at around 80 bucks in 80's money.
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u/kia75 5h ago
You can already buy your movies from Apple Itunes and stream them everywhere ala virtual blurays. Through MoviesAnywhere you can even watch them in multiple apps. Its just that Studios prefer the streaming model. A family can buy Moana once for $20 or they can buy a subscription to Disney Plus for $10 a month for all of a child's childhood! Plus, due to the vagaries of streaming royalties, the people who made Moana probably get much much less for the 5 years of Disney Plus subscriptions then the single Moana purchase.
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u/kneeco28 11h ago
Yea, here's a news report on it from 39 years ago: https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/1.5113403
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u/whatever_ehh 10h ago
Sony v. Universal City Studios was decided by the Supreme Court in 1984. That's how much the film industry disliked VCRs. It was a 5-4 decision to allow copying movies as "time shifting" rather than copyright infringement.
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u/Iyellkhan 11h ago
it was enough of a concern that they made sure a single movie on vhs cost a ridiculous amount of money (when you adjust for inflation). and that high cost wound up birthing the video rental store business.
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u/Sea_Spend_8008 10h ago
There is an ad with Dan Akroyd about telling people to come to the movies and not worry about staying at home. It might as well have been filmed in 2022 instead of 1983.
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u/mpaladin1 10h ago
Early VHS’s were stupid expensive, like $80 for a movie (I had a friend who owned an indie video rental business and she paid about $100 per item for the early release stuff even into the 1990’s). By the time market expanded enough and the studios got prices to a reasonable level, they had figured out how to market it.
As for the theaters, they were worried, but they negotiated a plan where features would be exclusive to the theaters for originally 60 days before rental and later 45. The 45-day window lasted until Covid when the studios moved the window to up to 3 weeks.
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u/MOTwingle 4h ago
and don't forget, back then, TVs were a lot smaller and not HD, so even renting a video and watching it at home wasn't equivalent to the "movie theatre" experience. Now with big screen TVs being so common (and relatively inexpensive) and in HD, the home video experience if more like the theatre than it was in the 80s-2000s.
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u/the_well_read_neck_ 3h ago
Not to mention, the movie theater was actually affordable back then. I've been to the movies a few times in the last couple of years, and there is almost no incentive for me to go back. I've got a nice tv and an excellent 5.1 surround sound. Hell, I was watching the new Dexter series the other night and jumped off the couch because I thought someone was walking into my kitchen. Turns out it was just that one rear right speaker and a door was opening in the show.
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u/natguy2016 9h ago
There was a lawsuit looking to ban VCRs for the fear of skipped commercials . It got to The Supreme Court and The VCR won. One reason cited is Mr. Rogers!!
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u/Commander_Cyclops 11h ago
There always seems to be a tantrum phase whenever a new format comes along.
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u/ArthurDentsRobeTie 10h ago
The movie industry wasn't that worried about the VCR because it had already made a pivot earlier to combat TV, a pivot that the movie industry knew would adversely affect home movie viewing.
Go back and look at really old movies, you'll notice something odd. The aspect ratio was much more square. It was 4:3, the same aspect ratio you see on CRT TVs.
When televisions became ubiquitous, movies shifted to the now familiar rectangular aspect ratios.
So when VCRs became common, that earlier move left companies putting out movies on VHS a bit of a quandary.
They could letterbox movies, preserving the entire picture, but putting it on a small part of a TV screen that was already low quality and usually pretty small. They could "pan and scan," with some very weird looking moves to accomplish it. Or they could just cut around the movie and concentrate on some piece of the image, often resulting in cutting out important things on the sides, top, and/or bottom.
They generally ended up doing a mix of the second two most of the time, resulting in a lesser experience watching movies on your TV screen. Coupled with the far lower quality, the much lower definition, of CRT screens, this is why people were so insistent that the theater experience was SO much better than home viewing.
This became another big thing when DVDs became more common. There were whole camps fighting over letterboxed vs. pan and scan vs. anamorphic widescreen and so on.
None of those experiences were comparable enough to movies in the theater to frighten the industry.
Then HD TVs with movie-style aspect ratios popped up. And very quickly became FAR more economical than "large" CRT TVs, and FAR more affordable than the other kinds of "big screen" TVs we had. At the same time, HD physical media (blu-ray) hit, followed (relatively) shortly by HD streaming, making HD movies on a pretty large screen available with VERY little hassle to almost EVERYONE.
Even so, people loved the community experience of a night at the movies, and surely THAT would never go away, right?
Oops. 2020 and COVID.
That's when the industry started to panic, and we're seeing there may be good reason for it.
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u/Educational_Metal_47 10h ago
What’s the good reason for what?
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u/ArthurDentsRobeTie 10h ago
There's a good reason for panic.
People are starting to decide that the theater isn't that great. 2020 caused a significant shift in people's thinking. They don't want to be with strangers so much. They like being home. They like seeing brand new movies with a few people they choose instead of every mouth breather in the tri-county area who's incapable of shutting the hell up. And they can afford a screen and a sound system that is up to the task of making the movie feel "special."
This is why theater chains are experimenting so hard with food service and bars and couch-like seats and so on. They're trying to figure out what will bring people out to The Cinema again.
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u/f0gax 8h ago
every mouth breather in the tri-county area
If theaters would deal with these people I don’t care what kind of food or booze they have. I’m fine with a Coke and some Sno Caps if the audience is well mannered.
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u/ArthurDentsRobeTie 8h ago
Put the ushers in those funny little hats, give 'em an old timey flashlight, and let 'em get a little mean with loud and obnoxious moviegoers. I'd go to that theater chain.
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u/f0gax 8h ago
Yes. The entertainment industry has always been fearful of new tech. Especially tech that puts more control in the hands of consumers.
It goes all the way back to at least recorded music. That was going to be the doom of musicians.
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u/times_zero 3h ago
Yes. The entertainment industry has always been fearful of new tech.
Well said.
It's not just the '80s with the rise of the home video market, either. The same thing happened in the '50s. That's why the CinemaScope format/ratio became popular at the time to give movie goers an experience they couldn't get with 4:3 TVs at the time. Also why the first big 3D craze was in the '50s, too. Anything to combat the rise of TV.
Hell, when home video games became popular in the '80s there was a concern it would take business away from TV, and cinema industries, too.
So, yeah, like you said new tech always causes a stir in the entertainment industry.
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u/zowietremendously 8h ago
Yes. But the opposite happened. It boosted the box office, and movies became more mainstream. If you liked movies before VHS, you were seen as a little bit weird. It's sorta like the way we look at people who are obsessed with tiktokers. But when those tiktokers start starring in movies and TV shows, now suddenly they're not seen as weird anymore, because they are legitimate now.
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u/BoogieDancePad 10h ago
I doubt it since vhs was more of an accessory to cinema than its own thing given that it’s probably expensive and time consuming to make them..
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u/Noisycarlos 10h ago
I might be misremembering, or this might be from when TVs first showed up. But I recall reading that one of the reasons theatrical movies went to widescreen formats was to differentiate from the more squared TVs.
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u/Quarantini 9h ago
How many dollar theatres or drive-ins showing second-run movies do you see around anymore? (Or porn theatres, lol)
Home video did pretty much kill them.
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u/count_strahd_z 8h ago
Yeah, I think adult theaters in particular vanished.
I think drive-in theaters died more due to other factors like not supporting the newer multi-channel audio formats and not having enough screens and the rise of stadium seating.
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u/SharksFan4Lifee 6h ago edited 6h ago
Funny you mention this, because I live within walking distance of one of the only adult drive-ins around, the Fiesta Drive In in El Paso, TX. The only adult drive in left in Texas after the one in Tyler closed in 2023. Fiesta could be the only one left in the country.
Still operates. 1 screen, movie starts at 9pm every day of the year. The concession stand is an adult store complete with an adult video arcade. Basically a place to buy sex toys, videos and bang in those arcade rooms. That said, they have theme nights to accommodate certain LGBTQ groups. And they also sell CBD. I wanna say the store is open all the time, you can go to the store without seeing the movie. So the movie on the outdoor screen is a very small part of their revenue stream, but it's one of many streams they encounter daily. Lmao
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u/orangezeroalpha 6h ago
An "adult drive-in" isn't what I'm thinking it is, right?
There is a drive-in near me, and they had a kickstarter a few years ago to help them purchase the digital projectors required by the studios. Happily, they made their goal, likely because the community really likes it around. There used to be a pizza hut across the street and they let people take it inside.
I was just talking to my friend about "dollar theaters" and it was something I somewhat forgot about. They'd get movies a month or so after it was in the regular theaters. We saw a ton of movies there. I don't see how that would work economically now. People paying $1 for a movie aren't going to likely pay $30 for popcorn. I remember by the end my friends and I had no shame; we didn't just sneak food in our pockets but just carried a sack of Taco Bell right past the guy taking our tickets.
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u/SharksFan4Lifee 6h ago edited 6h ago
An "adult drive-in" isn't what I'm thinking it is, right?
Sorry I guess I didn't talk about the movie part. Yes it's a porno. As I mentioned, there are theme nights. One night a week is gay porn and there are other theme nights but I don't know what they all are.
But yes, one porno movie plays on an outdoor screen at 9pm every night of the year (you can't see the movie at all from the street) and cars park in front of the screen and people watch the porno, jack off in their cars, bang in their cars, and yes, there are often creepy guys walking around the drive in lot trying to peep into the cars. Pretty much what you'd expect from a one screen drive in that only shows pornos lol.
And then on top of that, everything else I mentioned that happens in the area that would be the concession stand (adult store, adult arcade, and CBD store), which you can go to without buying a drive in movie ticket. And is open basically 24/7.
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u/orangezeroalpha 5h ago
You've given me a lot to think about.
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u/SharksFan4Lifee 5h ago edited 5h ago
Lmao.
I've actually never been, but I love telling people about it lol. The drive in part is really for exhibitionists. And the other stuff there--besides buying stuff--is for swingers and exhibitionists.
Naturally just watching porn isn't something people need to leave their house for anymore.
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u/Putrid-Catch-3755 3h ago
Tulsa no longer has dollar theaters but still has a thriving drive in movie theater called the Admiral Twin. We had a xxx drive in called the Capri. Its long gone. There is also an adult movie theater downtown.
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u/Vid_Word 8h ago
Today is different because it's literally a matter of a couple weeks before movies go from theaters to being available at home. That is absolutely insane! Back in the '80s, it wasn't even close to that. The window needs to go back to six to nine months.
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u/skittlebog 8h ago
The movie production companies brought law suits trying to restrict or block the sale of tape recorders. They framed it as allowing copyright violations. They had more success blocking the sale of DVD recorders. Those were harder to find.
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u/Helmut1642 7h ago
Yes there was some panic, this was the start of cineplex (and making smaller cinemas from big rooms) to allow greater choices and many older cinemas closed, then they went back to large screens as they found that people liked the big screens for the "spectacular" movies.
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u/butcher99 7h ago
Yes but not as big as the fear when TV came out and TV really did kill the movie business. I don't know about fear so much as worry that it would affect it and it did. I used to go to movies all the time but then after VCRs I seldom went unless it was to take the kids to a kids movie.
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u/Rom2814 7h ago
Not as much then as later.
When VHS came out, people had small TV’s (screen size anyway - they were huge otherwise), tiny little speakers, etc.
There was a LONG delay before movies appeared on tape and when they did they were priced for rental, not for owning.
It was easy to justify why going to the theater was a better experience (picture quality, aspect ratio, etc.).
We got our first VCR around 1981 (when I was 12) but I don’t think we owned a movie until 1985 - we went to the mom & pop rental place and then picked up a pizza.
Mostly we were renting movies we’d already seen in the theater or ones that never had a theatrical release where we lived.
I remember when Disney would only release a movie on VHS for a limited time before putting it back in the “vault” and not offering it again for several years.
I think the bigger concern was that people were recording shows and fast forwarding through commercials, not that they would stop going to the movies.
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u/Expensive-Sentence66 6h ago
No. If anything VHS made studios more money.
We had streaming in the 70's and 80. Called HBO and Cinemax.
Movie studios were smart and capitalized on VHS rentals and sales to make more money much like second run houses. As I recall the profit wasn't huge, but it was there. Studios also kept movies at theaters as long as possible before VHS unlike today to milk as much out of the theater run. Once that well was drained then the films showed on the premium movie channels.
Nobody ever said "I will just wait until it comes out on VHS or HBO." The theater experience was orders of magnitude better.
Today it goes from theater to streaming in weeks. From there to pirate sites the next day.
What VHS / DVD killed off was the theatrical porn industry.
What's killing theaters is there's just too much content available for streaming and the competition is higher and the value isn't there. Very few people go see obscure movies anymore. Too easy to stream.
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u/DarkReaper90 6h ago
Sorta. I knew many that would wait until it hit home release or TV, but VHS was priced insanely and there were huge delays for home release.
This is a promo for rental stores for Terminator 2. The VHS was released 5 months later and not only did you have to order a batch amount, you were FORCED to buy Drop Dead Fred too lol
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u/Relevant-Money-1380 6h ago
making luxuries like the movies unaffordable is going to kill movie theatres not streaming.
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u/SynthRogue 6h ago
No because movies would stay in the cinema for months and only be released on vhs a year later.
Today it's almost straight to streaming and in some cases it is.
It's greed from netflix and people having lost the habit of going to the cinema during and after lockdowns. Even though I was barely going to the cinema before then
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u/Anthroman78 5h ago
I'm sure there was, but honestly the TV's and the VHS quality just wasn't there.
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u/DonktorDonkenstein 5h ago
No. For one thing- Going to the theater was much cheaper in the VHS days. As the years have gone on, theaters have had to raise prices on everything from tickets to concessions to make a profit, and in the ultimate catch-22, the more expensive it is, the less people are willing to go. Secondly, before streaming, theaters had a monopoly on presentation. Watching movies on TV was a huge compromise. Standard def tvs were mostly designed to display a 4:3 picture so you rarely saw anything in the aspect ratio a theater could present, at least without shrinking the image into a picture for ants. And the larger the TV screen got, the TV itself became exponentially heavier, deeper and more expensive. In short, VHS didn't threaten theaters at all.
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u/erwan 3h ago
The TVs back then were not as good. CRT, small by today's standard, low quality... Sound wasn't great either.
So the experience between watching a movie at home and in a theater was night and day.
Nowadays many people have 55+ inches TV with a good sound setup, and if you factor in other viewers the experience at home might even be better than in a theater.
So no, there was no fear for the theaters as the experience was much better than at home.
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u/PrivateTumbleweed 1h ago
My parents always went to the movies, they said, until 1980, when my dad brought home the RCA SelectaVision VDT625 VHS Video Cassette Recorder. We amassed a big collection of movies after that, and I don't remember my parents ever going to the movies again.
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u/reesemonkey 58m ago
Funny segment from an 80s movie about video piracy.All of them are recorded on VHS and are mostly work print of movies.If nobody pointed it out,most people would have thought it was a modern day satire done in 80s retro style https://youtu.be/Dc_KRPvu-Z8?feature=shared
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u/Yakitori_Grandslam 52m ago
In the U.K. home video absolutely did crash the cinema industry, but this was also down to woeful underinvestment in cinemas, many of which had been built decades before and in areas of town that were no longer economically attractive.
Also, between 86 and 89 (back to the future and Batman) there wasn’t a huge family blockbuster.
Batman showed there was a market, coincidentally this was the point where multiplexes started to be built and upgrades to cinemas came in.
Then in the 90s you had the market forces to kill independent video rental.
- better cinemas
- satellite movie channels
- blockbuster video
- cheap retail of movies
- supermarkets/Sunday trading eroding the off licence trade (where video rental was a side trade).
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u/doyoucreditit 11h ago
Clearly they don't actually believe in the market balancing demand and production.
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u/mydogisatortoise 11h ago
Being protective of the copywritten IP you've invested untold millions in is somehow anticompetitive? Ok bud.
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u/doyoucreditit 11h ago
Movie theater owners have no IP right in commercially produced VHS, and have at best limited ability to encourage distributors to choose theatrical release over streaming platforms - they're in competition.
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u/mydogisatortoise 11h ago
Streaming didn't exist for decades after VHS died. They don't belong in the same sentence or formula.
You don't think movie studios and producers had an interest in the health of the theater industry?
For years VHS tapes cost $50-$70 for new releases and reproduction quality VCRs cost several thousand dollars. This was in early 90's dollars.
Needless to say, there are a bunch of variables involved that have changed greatly or no longer exist.
Source: video rental store manager 1995 to 1999.1
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u/idkalan 10h ago
Because of that fear, movie studios agreed to charge their video tapes up to $60 in the 90s, which if you changed it due to inflation, it would be around $150 in today's money.
Due to that high price some retailers started allowing people to rent video tapes which gave birth to Blockbuster and other companies.
That ability to rent tapes made studios had to lower their prices to a much more affordable price
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u/shinobipopcorn 10h ago
Disney charged 79.99; when they ran a christmas special for 29.99 on a few titles sales exploded and eventually caused prices to drop.
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u/TheUmgawa 9h ago
Yes, but it was mitigated by the fact that movies didn't hit VHS until a movie had been out of theaters for a year or more, and sometimes it was even longer than that. E.T. didn't hit VHS for something like five or six years. The film exhibition business got all of the money it could out of a film, and FOMO caused people to go see it, because they didn't know when it'd be out on VHS, let alone pay channels like HBO or Cinemax, let alone when or if it would be a Movie Of The Week on broadcast television. Eventually, it got down to the point where it was about six months after a movie left theaters (barring cases like Home Alone or Titanic, where they were still playing after the VHS release), and then another six months for paid cable channels, then another six or twelve months for free cable channels.
Today, there's an expectation that a movie is going to show up on some streaming service or another, usually within about six months of the film's release, and I think the best thing for the industry is to disassociate people from that expectation. Screw 'em. Let 'em wait.
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u/quats555 11h ago
Absolutely. Many early VHS were “rental priced” — priced to be out of range for most consumers, but where a rental store would invest to get the money back on rentals. This is actually how I saw TRON as a kid: I won my pick of 10 Disney VHS movies and a VHS player, and I noticed this one on the list that was $80 so figured it was amazing and picked it for one of my selections. It was rental priced but I’m glad I got it, still one of my favorite movies.
The other common deterrent was delay. Now it’s a few months from big screen to home release, but back then it was usually years.