Direct to DVD = Crap?

Dunno know how many times I’ve scoured the DVD rack at Best Buy or Walmart and have seen movies that I didn’t know about. Why, you might ask? Well, that’s because they didn’t come out in theatres, silly! That sounded childish.. I’ll never do that again.

Anyway, Direct-to-DVD is a path that more movies are taking every year. There are several benefits of taking a movie straight to DVD:

Lower Cost of Production

A lot of times, a direct to DVD movie won’t have the production costs of a feature film that goes to theatres. This is due to the lower cost of advertising, and the lower cost of the people who work on the movie. I’m talking mainly about the stars. You don’t often hear of a big time hollywood star working on a direct to dvd movie, unless their name is Steven Seagal.

Lower Marketing Cost

This is pretty obvious… you don’t have to advertise before other movies, on TV or anywhere else really. There are probably some small ads in the paper but probably nothing else. They bank on word of mouth and other forms of marketing, on a much smaller scale too.

BUT what I think of these movies is that they’re CRAP. Big, huge steaming piles of CRAP. If a movie isn’t good enough to make it to at least an independent release, then it’s probably crap. I don’t understand why studios would waste their resources on making these movies and hope they can sell a few thousand copies to recoup the cost of making the movie.

I’ll throw one example out there. I know that many of you may not have enjoyed Starship Troopers, but I did. Just something about it that I liked. I really really didn’t expect them to come out with another though, because it was a little cheesy and I didn’t think they had much to go on from there. But what do you know… they did!!!! Starship Troopers 2 came out as a Direct to DVD release. I didn’t even know that it came out until I saw it on the rack at Walmart or something.

I’m not the only one who felt this way…. check out this comment from IMDB:

In the past few months, a bunch of direct-to-video sequels to highly successful movies have been released. There has been WILD THINGS 2, there has been CRUEL INTENTIONS 3, there has been THE SKULLS 3, and now there is STARSHIP TROOPERS 2: HERO OF THE FEDERATION, a disappointing follow-up to the science fiction classic STARSHIP TROOPERS. There was really no reason for this movie to exist. A sequel was not necessary, but for some odd reason, this sequel was made.

The original STARSHIP TROOPERS was a big-budget extravaganza with a budget around $105 million. STARSHIP TROOPERS 2: HERO OF THE FEDERATION has a budget of a around $6 million so naturally the special effects in this one look like crap. The special effects are not the only poor-looking aspect of the movie. In fact, the whole movie just looks terrible. The cinematography is awful as is the acting, writing, and directing. This movie is as bad as a sequel can get. No stars.

Source: IMDB

I mean… cmon… are you serious? If there’s a movie that makes even some money, you can bank on the studio trying to make a sequel. But if it really was a one hit wonder, why even try to take 2-3% of the budget and make a sequel??? Especially direct to dvd. I understand trying to make a movie on the big screen and having that fail, because then you learn a lesson. It wasn’t meant to be… you lost out on your investment. The scary thing about direct to DVD is that they might actually make money of some of these atrocious movies. This will only encourage more of them!!! If it’s a good movie on the big screen, I’ll probably get it on DVD. If it’s not even good enough for that, why would I even consider it??

That being said, this is only my opinion. Any Direct to DVDers that you really liked?

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