Consumers continue to scream about DVD sets coming out constantly with slightly better features that force them to purchase the same thing over and over, but apparently the movie studios just don’t care.

While cruising through the Blu-ray section of Amazon today, I noticed The Lord of the Rings trilogy box set coming out, but I also noticed that of the 716 customer reviews, 577 of them were one-star votes.  That was when I noticed in the title it said “(Theatrical Editions)".  Oh good, here we go again.

Back when these movies first came out on DVD, we had the individual releases after each one was in the theater, and after Return of the King, we got a boxed set of all three together.  Shortly after that we got the individual Extended Editions, and then yet another boxed set.  Many people ended up buying multiple copies because they just didn’t have the patience to wait, or they weren’t aware this was a common tactic of film studios.  Either way, a lot of people ended up with more copies of these films than they needed.

Luckily I’ve personally learned my lessons over the years.  Such as, I will no longer buy individual seasons of any television show from HBO because they always releases a really nice boxed set when the series ends, and it always has more bonus features you can’t get anywhere else.  The same goes for a lot of standard television shows, such as Battlestar Galactica is now getting complete series boxed sets on both standard def DVD and Blu-ray, so hopefully not many people went through the pain of buying numerous half seasons.

There are even rumors that the Transformers DVDs I spoke of a few weeks ago will be combined into a series box set after they release all of the individual seasons.

Movie studios need to start realizing consumers are not endless pits of money that they can just keep dipping into time after time.  I have never purchased the Kill Bill movies, even though I want to, because I just know they will do a special edition set someday with the two movies combined.  I hate having to spend my time second guessing the studios all the time, but I also don’t want to give them any more money that I absolutely have to.

Entry was posted on Saturday, May 16th, 2009 at 4:31 pm under DVDs, Movies.  Print This Post