Recent walks through various local chain stores have led me to wonder if I wasn’t seeing quite the variety of DVD titles that I’ve been used to seeing. More and more shelf space seemed to have been taken up with multiple copies of the most popular current releases while older catalog titles, more obscure titles and anything released longer than six months previously were becoming a rapidly vanishing breed.
It turns out this trend was not just my imagination. This past Sunday, The New York Times ran a piece looking at the number of DVD releases annually on the market and how that affects how much shelf space older titles and discs from smaller distributors are affected. It’s interesting reading and gives a look at some of the business forces at work as to why you may not be able to find a copy of James Cagney in 13 Rue Madeleine (1947) at the local Blockbuster but three displays of Let’s Go To Prison (2007).
You can read the article here.
