DVD Producers Don’t Like Extras
Movie producers don’t like doing DVD extras. They don’t think it’s worth the time and money spent on them, and they’d rather just do away with them altogether.
Frankly, I don’t think I’d miss them. I rent a lot of movies through my zip.ca membership (zip.ca is similar to NetFlix). And I rarely, if ever, check out a DVD’s extras. I find all the making-of featurettes to be pretty boring. They’re just extra-long commercials for the film. If I wanted that, I’d just check out the trailer. Most of the other stuff I find boring as well. There’s only one extra that I really liked, and that was actor and director biographies. Remember those? And that’s one feature that nobody’s doing anymore. It was extra-nice when an actor’s bio contained film trailers containing that actor.
Ah well. What do you guys think? Are movie extras worth it? Would you miss them if studios stopped producing them?
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July 25th, 2006 at 9:11 am
I do like the commentaries.
It really gets into what the director was seeing for the scene and also I like it when they point out flaws like when Peter Jackson said “see that car in the background there?” in LOTR FOTR.
July 25th, 2006 at 10:30 am
I too like the commentaries. But having recently entered the HD world and realizing (hoping) that they can use the space on the disc to improve the quality, I’d choose quality over the extras.
I quess in a perfect world we could have 1 disc for the movie and 1 disc for extras. I would even pay extra for the supplemental disc if the movie disc was high quality.
RoCKo
July 25th, 2006 at 10:59 am
A total waste of time/money; I’ve yet to buy/rent one based on such extras.
July 25th, 2006 at 11:54 am
I say get rid of most of the extras, increase the bit rate of the movie and the audio. Thats what we are paying for, is the movie, not to have a bunch of extras that may only be seen once or twice. Id much rather have higher quality video and audio. I think RoCKo’s idea is better…give me the best quality movie you can on 1 disc, and if extras want to be included..make a second disc! Thats why I like Superbit…just the movie!
August 1st, 2006 at 7:34 pm
I like extras. With the new formats having so much room and with the more recent compression schemes (VC-1 anh H.264) being waaaay more efficient, having supplements in SD is a non-issue. The best are, of course, commentaries. It’s always interesting to have the point of view of the artists behind the movie, and a stereo soundtrack takes absolutely no space.
A lot of people buy DVDs (I said buy, not rent) because of the extras. So pleast, Mister Big Studios, don’t be stupid and keep on with nice and interesting extras. They’re not THAT expensive to produce (hell most documentaries are shot in DV), so I really don’t see the problem.