Hey, peeps. I wanted to field something, and hopefully not get pointed and sniggered at for it.
So, JMS's B5 direct to DVD stuff is in shooting now. I just wondered if anybody has an opinion on the finances of those sorts of projects. I was playin' around, and I figure we know Firefly sold at least 250,000 DVD sets in 2004 as Chris Buchanan disclosed that online. Assuming it didn't grow, that's not a bad budget on it's own if you counted all those people pickin' something up.
Or maybe I'm missing a bit of logic.
I think the faulty logic is in "if you counted all those people pickin' something up."
Why should that be expected? I would probably buy it, but I'm sure my parents, for example, probably wouldn't. They didn't really like Serenity, for one thing.
The real question is WTF is somebody making B5 Direct-To-DVDs for? I expect them to fail miserably.
I'm interested to see how the B5 D2DvD works out. It's a good test case.
Warner Brothers just launched a D2DVD business, which will focus pretty heavily on developing franchises they already own. Their stated goal is to keep the production budget under $5 million. The B5 D2DVD "anthology" stories each focus on one of the major characters, which keeps the casting budget down.
B5 DVDs have made a lot of money. It was syndicated widely -- and internationally. Cha-ching. The print-on-demand scriptbooks appear to be selling at a nice clip, and AFAIK without publicity outside fandom. After a decade, I suspect that they've got a pretty good idea of how many people will spend $20 for a DVD they've never seen.
Their stated goal is to keep the production budget under $5 million.
Under 5 million? I wonder if that's the figure 20th Century Fox quoted to Joss for his Buffyverse DVD movies. He did say that they didn't happen due to money issues.
I'll be buying the B5 D2DVD.
Not actually related to all our talk of fair use, but.... I was trying to look for actual licenced Firefly/Serenity merchandise, and I can't seem to find any. Would anyone have a suggestion of where I should look?
Ailleann: [link]
Babylon 5 made WB a fortune on DVD. How do I know this? JMS once posted the sales figures online - which, by the way, is not a way to make friends.
It'll be interesting to see if they do online distribution on iTunes with the B5 thing. If they get the word out, I imagine they'll make a mint from it. I just checked and JMS said the B5 DVDs made over $500m for Warners.
Thanks for the link, Kevin. Does Universal not have an online swag store, like for instance New Line does?
Nah. Well, they do, but it's got two things on it - Serenity DVD and HD-DVD. Which is, of course, a bit crap.
