When did announcing the
release of a film to the home entertainment market place become so damn
difficult? The latest example in
screwing it up marks the fourth Best Picture contender this year to be dumped
into the market without fanfare.
First we had Sony
Pictures Home Entertainment’s non-announcement for Zero Dark Thirty (Mar.
19), which was followed by a similar move for Django Unchained (Apr.
16) and then Lincoln got rushed home without a word after its pre-book date
had passed (Mar. 26).
Now Anchor Bay
Entertainment does it again with the Apr. 30 unceremonious flushing of
writer/director David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook.
Our guess is that the
sales people bypassed the normal process and defensively made the call to
retailers for the Apr. 30 street date for both a DVD and a separate Blu-ray
product launch. The ARR works out to 165
days and the box office take (and still growing) comes in at $120.6 million.
Normally, Anchor Bay
Entertainment’s PR activities are executed with studio-level precision, but the
wheels appear to have come loose with both Django Unchained and Silver
Linings Playbook … we suspect the common denominator for the sudden
rash of train wrecks to be the producers of both films (Bob and Harvey
Weinstein), but lacking a smoking gun we will just assume that the act of
producing and distributing a press announcement has suddenly alluded our
friends in Michigan.
Without a formal
announcement there are no details available on what bonus nuggets might be
included on either the DVD or Blu-ray SKUs.
To download this week's
complete edition of the DVD and Blu-ray Release Report: DVD & Blu-ray Release Report
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