Last year’s Will Smith summer hit, I, Robot, arrived on DVD on Dec. 14, a modest single disc released just in time for Christmas. This week, barely five months later, it’s back as a two-disc special edition.So is the weather-disaster blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow, originally released Oct. 12. Oh, and there’s the Denzel Washington action hit Man on Fire, first released Sept. 14.
DVD enthusiasts call this practice "double-dipping" by the companies that release the discs. Fans use the term in an especially derogatory way when the releases come just months apart with no advance warning, as Fox Home Entertainment did with its re-released DVDs this week ($26.98 each).
"That’s the way marketing works," explains Scott Hettrick, who tracks the DVD industry as the editor in chief of the trade weekly Video Business. "You put out a product, and then if it seems to be popular enough and if you think you added something to it to make it more popular or you put out a different version of it ... you get ’em to buy it again.
"It’s not like the DVD industry has come up with this clever marketing scheme," he points out, noting that the practice is used with most consumer products, from clothing to books to cars.
"Having said that," he adds, "does it make it any more palatable for the average person trying to buy something? No."
Special-edition re-releases of DVDs are nothing new. Every studio puts them out. The ideal revamped disc comes out for an older movie whose original DVD deserves a makeover — such as a two-disc special edition of the 1968 Steve McQueen film Bullitt, which replaces an anemic 1997 disc. At worst, the time span between releases is at least a few years.
But increasingly, for new movies, the period is just a few months — and with no advance word that a re-release is planned when the first version comes out. It’s not just this week’s three releases from Fox, whose representatives declined to comment when asked. For example, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment put out the Underworld DVD on Jan. 6, 2004, not announcing until after its release that a two-disc special edition was coming just a few months later, on May 25. Warner Home Video did the same with the Halle Barry thriller Gothika, out on March 23, 2004, and again on Oct. 12.
To be clear, in just about all cases the special edition improves upon the first DVD. The new I, Robot, for example, adds two commentary tracks to the previous director’s commentary, and the second disc covers the making of the movie so exhaustively that a detailed index is required to navigate among the dozens of features. (The audio and video presentations of the movie appear to be identical, though.)
But there are right ways for the DVD companies to do such quick-turnaround re-releases while keeping consumers in mind.
When New Line Home Entertainment announced the DVDs of The Lord of the Rings movies, it noted at the same time that special extended editions would be coming later. Before Sony released the first DVDs of Hellboy and The Grudge, the makers of each film had already been widely quoted online and in articles that souped-up versions would be coming soon.
The perfect scenario is when a no-frills disc and a special edition are released on the same day, so consumers can decide at once which version they want to buy. Unfortunately, that’s not the norm.
"It would be wonderful if everything just came out one time and had everything on it and was the cheapest price possible," Hettrick says, "but that’s just not realistic."
