Irrational Distribution Dominates Apple+ Handling Of Auteur Filmmaker Martin Scorsese's Killers Of The Flower Moon

It is a mystery as to why perfectly reasonable and rational people would sign on to the cult of streaming to the detriment of their own financial best interests.

Take for example auteur filmmaker Martin Scorsese’s sure-to-be-Oscar nominated Killers of the Flower Moon.   It’s an over-budget film production from Apple TV, which is notorious for streaming films and series on its platform and then burying them.   

CODA was also nominated Best Picture … and it won, but it has yet to see the light as a legitimate physical media release.   

Scorsese’s film opened theatrically on Oct. 20 nationwide and has pulled in $66.5 million thus far (against a reported production budget of $200 million).   That’s a good start at gnawing away the red ink (which Apple TV dismisses as “advertising”).   

Instead of securing DVD, Blu-ray and 4K Ultra HD unit sales — which they would control — the company elected to feed the streaming beast (VOD) and bypass the high profit margin physical media revenue stream that would have further cut into the red ink, and, in the process lowered the company’s “advertising costs.”   

The result, within hours the “helper” community (aka: pirates; aka: bootleggers) were out with Blu-ray copies of their own.   The packaging was slick and consumers who frequent these wrong-side-of-the-tracks establishments have likely been there before and got pretty much what they wanted (nice packaging too, pristine master supplied by Apple TV).

Apple TV could have sold the “paperback” edition (VOD) and at any time to those who don’t go to theatres or buy physical media, but choose instead to sully the marketplace with bootleg copies (of good quality — none of that hand-held camcorder stuff of years gone by).   Foolish.