Needless to say that numerous Google searches yielded nothing, until today.  Mad Max is back in the press (they’re apparently making a fourth) and Thunderdome was on telly last night (which prompted me to watch 1 and 2).

Anyway, I finally tracked down a site that seems to specialise in post apocalypse movies.  A search on the site brought up Battletruck (which seems to have been called Warlords of the 21st Century in the US).

You can find various bits on YouTube, including playlists of the chunks.

It was actually shot in New Zealand, it seems the antipodeans make good post-apocalypse road movies (Mad Max was made in Australia).

Don’t get me wrong, I imagine it’s a terrible movie these days, but thought I would post to make sure any like-minded individuals can find details of such post-apocalyptic gold.

The post discusses a conversation between Reed Hastings, CEO of Netfix, and Chris Null of the Motley Fool.  You can find the Yahoo Tech write-up here, the Video Business summary here and the original MP3 interview here.

Hastings believes DVD has only two years left as the primary format for movies.  So why is DVD still the primary format? Blu-ray won the format war and has slowly been gaining traction, but most of the people I know don’t have a stand-alone Blu-ray player.  Most watch Blu-rays on their PS3, mainly because they don’t buy Blu-ray movies.

Some of them use iTunes to rent or buy (mainly to buy) and some use rental services like Netflix and LOVEFiLM, most still just buy DVDs.

Personally, I’d like to be able to get digital downloads but I typically just buy DVDs.  I don’t own a Blu-ray player, not even a PS3.  The question is why?  The answers are simple:

1. Price – DVDs are significantly cheaper than the other formats.
2. Flexibility – there are tons of ways to rip DVDs into formats you can use in other locations, onto my media centre PC, for example, or my iPod.  They’ll play practically anywhere and I can easily loan them out.

Let’s take a look at price, for example.

What about the advantages of the other formats?  Blu-ray has higher quality picture and sound.  I have a 32” HDTV, but you’d be hard pressed to see the difference between 1080p (Blu-ray) and 720p, especially at the distance I sit (here’s a chart), realistically you’ll need a 40”+ screen to worry about it.  I also use the standard TV speakers, so surround sound doesn’t help me.

Compare that to a digital download (from iTunes, for example).  Some are standard definition format, which is lower quality than DVD and some are HD (typically 720p, a typical DVD, for comparison, is around 480i/p).  So you may or may not get better quality.  The only real benefit seems to be instant availability and the lack of physical media (which may be a plus to some).

So no real benefits for most people.  Then you the main negative: price.  Take a look at The Dark Knight, for example:

• DVD: £4.98 (Amazon)
• Blu-ray: £12.98 (Amazon)
• Download: £6.99 (iTunes)

Now bear in mind that Amazon offers free delivery (and even if it didn’t, Play.com does, with prices of £4.99 and £12.99) and DVD comes out the clear favourite on price.

To be fair though, taking a newer release, The Boat that Rocked, as an example:

• DVD: £11.98 (Amazon)
• Blu-ray: £15.68 (Amazon)
• Download: £10.99 (iTunes)

The difference is, as I’ve already shown, give it a few weeks and it’ll be under £10, give it a few months and it’ll be £5-£8.  Not the same for the others in my experience.

So no tangible benefits and a clear negative on price.  If they want people to switch formats at the least they should match the price!

Then you have flexibility.  DVD is supported by all computer operating systems, you can’t play Blu-ray on Linux and none of the Macs have Blu-ray drives as an option. There are tons of tools to help you get DVDs into formats for iPods and other media players, not so many for Blu-ray and iTunes downloads will only play on your PC or other Apple products.  There are car DVD players, portable DVD players and you’re pretty-much guaranteed to be able to play one if you take it round a friend’s house.

Not so with the other formats.  So they both lose to DVD in flexibility.  You could even add that most people don’t have a computer or Apple device hooked up to their TV, so downloads aren’t viable anyway.

All in all, there are too many reasons to stick with DVD at the moment and I don’t see that changing short term.  What about in two year’s time?  I think Blu-ray will have more market share, but I’m expecting downloads to be on the climb by that point and Blu-ray will, I think, become obsolete before it ever takes off.  It doesn’t offer sufficient benefits to warrant the cost to move and I don’t think it ever will.  Downloads will offer some practical benefits in terms of quick availability and, once we get some competition, cost (downloads are already starting to compete on price but could and probably should be much cheaper than DVDs).  They need more home theatre integration though, which probably won’t be PCs connected to TVs, but more Apple TV-like devices.

1. Naomi Watts, $44 for every $1
2. Jennifer Connelly, $41 for every $1
3. Rachel McAdams, $30 for every $1
4. Natalie Portman, $28m for every $1
5. Meryl Streep, $27 for every $1

Likewise it’s interesting at how $150 million seems to be considered ‘normal’ for a movie these days. And to think some directors struggle to pull together $5 million.

Method

It’s probably worth noting that the prices were harvested from Amazon.co.uk over a period of about four months (February – June 2009). It’s also worth noting that some of these prices were pre-release.

The figures were collected fairly simply, I monitored their top 10 DVDs each day and recorded the details. I would then monitor those DVDs thereafter and add a row whenever the price changed, marking the date it did.

Download the Data

You can download the data here in PDF format here, and CSV here.

Findings

Two month sweet spot

My gut feel before this was that two months was the sweet spot, wait two months after release and, invariably, the price had plummeted. While I didn’t have too many films where I could really say where release was and when it dropped below £10 (they didn’t while I was capturing data, for example), from the eight I did look at they varied from 24 days to 89 days after release but the average was 55 days.

Watch out for rocks

Some really do drop like a rock. Taken, for example, dropped to £7.98 after 55 days, but was down to £6.98 just two days later. It took just 113 days to drop below £5 (to £4.98).

Your Don’t Mess with the Zohan and Burn After Reading dropped the fastest, getting to under £10 in 24 days each, although they appeared right at the start so they were probably higher for longer (I first recorded Burn After Reading on 28th February, whereas Amazon state its release date as the 9th Feb, Zohan also appeared 28th Feb, but has a release date of the 19th Jane).

Animated movies hold their value

Something else I’d seen before and it born out in my figures is that Disney and Pixar animated movies don’t drop, or at least take a long time to do so. WALL-E was released on the 24th November, but was still at £13.48 by late June 2009 (at the time of writing it’s at £7.98). Pinocchio (Platinum edition) was released on the 9th of March and was still at £14.48 at the end of June (at the time of writing it’s up to £16.48!). This from a film released in 1940.

Price tweaking

It’s obvious Amazon tweak their prices continually, by as little as 1p and often by 10p. I believe this was in response to what other retailers (online and offline) were doing. For example, High School Musical 3 bounced between £13.18 and £13.38 a total of 17 times over 61 days (between 15th April and 14th June) and it wasn’t massively different either side. There were a couple of instances where, shortly after release or on release the price dropped massively. In the case of Twilight and Quantum of Solace I seem to remember this was to counter so strong offers by big supermarket chains.

As such, it’s worth keeping an eye out for a bargain, quite a few big films dropped massively in price during their run down in price and can also spike. Mamma Mia! was at £6.98 and £7.98 in March, and suddenly shot up to £17.98 on the 8th April for a few days before dropping back down to £6.98 a few days later. Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa dropped to £9.98 in March, went back up to £10.98 and then £11.98 in April, dropped to £7.98 in May and £9.98 in June before jumping back up to £11.98 in late June. The Dark Knight suddenly jumped from £5.98 to £12.98 in April for three days before falling back to £5.98 again.

DVD vs Blu-ray

The only real comparison I have DVD versus Blu-ray is Quantum of Solace. The DVD started at £12.98, the Blu-ray at £17.98. For some of March the DVD was 1p dearer, at £17.99 compared to £17.98 for the Blu-ray, and for a few days in April it was cheaper too (£11.98 versus £12.68), before it climbed back up to £5 dearer. It did eventually dip to £9.98 in mid-June, by which time the DVD was £7.98. The DVD managed a drop to £6.98 for three days in March, making it £11 cheaper for a time.

I want to look at a cost comparison in a separate article (not just between DVD and Blu-ray), but generally it looks like Blu-ray stays higher for longer and doesn’t benefit from the same sudden drops after a few months.

Conclusion

To put it simply, my feelings bore out. Wait two months after the release and you’ll pay less than a tenner for your DVDs. If you can wait three to four you’ll probably pay much less and maybe even under a fiver.

Great video showcasing 100 years of movie effects.

You could argue that for most genres, the only ones in the ‘middle ground’ these days seem to be rom-coms or contemporary dramas. Although looking at box office mojo there’s quite a few sub-$100 million sci-fi movies from recent years, I guess it depends on your definition of mid-sized: Cloverfield ($25m), Signs ($72m), The Faculty ($15m), Evolution ($80m), Jumper ($85m), Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy ($50m), Children of Men ($76m), Babylon A.D. ($70m), Resident Evil ($33m), Underworld ($22m) and Blade II ($54m).

On the other hand, I do agree about CGI:

But one thing does kind of suck about it. Most of that money is spent on CGI. Maybe Avatar will be the game changer, but for me — CGI jeopardy isn’t usually that compelling. Are you still blown away by green screen vistas and pixel generated monsters? Are you still terrified by tidal waves and explosions that took rocket scientists months to render?

I like that stuff. I like it a lot in fact. I read Cinefex every month. But CGI just doesn’t freak me out or put me on the edge of my seat like it once did. I think one of the great things about science fiction movies that don’t have a gazillion dollars to spend is that they need to make choices. They need to come up with ways to use filmmaking techniques and practical effects to adjust for the fact that they can’t afford 1000+ CGI shots. They’ve gotta build suspense the old fashioned way: Hide the creature for a while. Shoot on location. Blow stuff up. Crash a car. Pay a stuntman to do a full body burn. That’s the stuff I miss. I miss movies like Star Wars, Escape From New York, Alien, Aliens, Outland and Predator. Movies where a big part of my suspension of disbelief came from recognizing a world where physics could be painful and not everything was in focus all the time.

A good example of this has been the old Star Wars movies, versus the new. Where previously there was a used universe that was gritty and tactile, it’s been replaced with the shiny and blatantly not-real CGI version, which takes you out of it.

The thing that caught me was this:

Yet when I took a group of kids to see Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride, I was genuinely surprised when one seven-year-old asked to leave. ‘What didn’t you like?’ I asked. ‘Was it the fact that the Bride’s eyeball kept falling out? Or the stuff with the skeletons?’ ‘Oh no,’ she replied. ‘It wasn’t that. It was just the fact that it was so … big!’ It turns out she had only been to the cinema once before, to see The Magic Roundabout, and had exactly the same problem. In the video age, the sheer scale of modern cinema can be pretty terrifying.

Before writing this review I went back and looked at the reviews I had written for the other films and novels. I was surprised at how few there were:

• My review of Order of the Phoenix
• My review of Goblet of Fire
• My review of the Half-blood Prince novel

I’ve been writing posts on various sites since 2004, but what I had forgotten is that Half-Blood Prince was released in 2005, so I didn’t review anything earlier (I still don’t think I’ve reviewed the Deathly Hallows novel). Watching the movie I realised just how much I had forgotten, it has been four years (I’m going to need to read Deathly Hallows again, which was released in 2007, so will be three years when the first film comes out and four when the final one is released, assuming they don’t ’slip’ like Half-Blood did).

My general consensus on the film reviews was that both Goblet and Phoenix were fast-paced, with the film makers trying to include as much of the books as they could while keeping the runtime down. I actually didn’t mind in Phoenix, there was a lot that could be lost, although it was confusing at times. Half-Blood is much the same, big chunks are missing, some storylines and scenes are only briefly touched on.

I suspect the reason for splitting the final book into two films is because there is so much plot detail that simply can’t be lost they need to keep it for the series to make any sense, so they were forced to split it, rather than any financial reasons (not that it hurts).

As with the other films, I came away having enjoyed it, but not raving about it. The cast, as always, did well. Grint again turns out the comic performances and does so very well. Watson seem very rigid as Hermione and Radcliffe does well as the boy carrying the fate of the world. The supporting cast, filled with top quality, barely gets to stretch its legs, but always delivers, with new addition Jim Broadbent putting in a great turn as Horace Slughorn.

I felt the relationships were handled well enough, capturing the polar feelings of young love. Harry’s kiss with Ginny was moved to a completely different place and was over so quickly I thought they must be due for another but it never came. Not the heart-thumping triumph of the book.

My biggest regret with the films is the humour they miss from the books, though they had a stab at it in places and leaving it out makes for darker and more serious tones, it’s hard to make people scared of Voldemort when they’re bust laughing. It does mean Fred and George are again criminally under-used.

Looking back at my review of the book I pulled a couple of points out:

…I did like the ‘memory trips’ to introduce Voldemort’s history and to flesh him out as Harry’s nemesis, long and drawn out they may be, but he is the reason for the series (no Voldemort and Harry is just a regular wizard). They let us see his cruel nature and persistent planning, building him as a formidable opponent, as well as giving us a few ideas as to how Harry can defeat him in the final confrontation.

I didn’t really get that feeling here, the flashbacks were mainly to show Voldemort/Tom Riddle and to get the information from Slughorn about the horcruxes. I didn’t feel Voldemort was really part of this film, leaving cameos for some of his Death Eaters, but little else.

…I knew who died and who killed them before I got there. It didn’t take away the impact though, I was stunned and shaken. I have a pretty good imagination, I tend to get headlong into a story, and maybe that worked against me, but as I finished the book I had to take a deep breath and remind myself that it was only a story and that it’ll all turn out right by the end of book 7.

I definitely didn’t feel that in the film. It was a fairly short scene, lots of solemn faces but that was pretty much it. Definitely a damp squid there.

The effects and set design were again in a league of their own, unlike many films were you know it’s a set the Potter locations all feel real (with the possible exception of some of the externals of the castle).

So a good, but not a great movie and, to be honest, I don’t hold out much hope that the remaining will be much better. That’s not to say that they’re bad, this film is definitely worth a watch and I think they’re probably getting better as the series goes on, I’m just no sure they’ll be long standing favourites we all go back to time and again.