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It's not even doing a good job of that, though. The other day someone mentioned the 1990 movie "Taking Care of Business" with Jim Belushi and Charles Grodin. It
by imgabe 3y ago
It's not even doing a good job of that, though. The other day someone mentioned the 1990 movie "Taking Care of Business" with Jim Belushi and Charles Grodin. It's a pretty unremarkable movie, but I remembered liking it as a kid for whatever reason and wanted to see it again.
Of course, it's not on any of the four streaming services I pay for (I'm outside the US so ymmv). And why? Why is the studio hoarding access to this film that probably stopped making them money decades ago when they could just lease out the streaming rights and make something of it?
I would kind of love it if there were a modern day TNT / TBS / USA that had all the movies you half-remembered from long ago, but Hollywood can't get their heads out of their asses long enough in the scramble for each individual property to have its own streaming service to pick up literal free money that is just sitting there.
- jimt1234 3y agoThis is exactly why I miss the old, neighborhood, mom-and-pop DVD-rental store. The place near my apartment back in the early-2000s pretty much never removed anything from the shelves, so you could find almost any movie ever made. You just had to wipe the dust off some of them.
- cromka 3y agoAny movie ever made in the US, that is…
- jfoutz 3y agoIt depended. I mean, nobody's going to have everything. It wasn't too hard to come by _man bites dog_ or _run lola run_. European art house stuff. A different place had a deep Spanish selection. In my part of the u.s. southwest, Bollywood, Japan and Korea were under-represented. I'd imagine different proprietors had different tastes. See something they liked, if it rented, look for more of that flavor.
- killjoywashere 3y agoIf you can erase the past, you can control the population by influencing their collective memory.
- text0404 3y agoare you implying that the collapse of mom and pop DVD rental stores is part of a plot to manipulate society?
- rakoo 3y agoThe collapse of rent-what-you-want has definitely helped the rise of rent-what-we-want
- TMWNN 3y agoMaybe not directly. But killjoywashere makes an interesting point. My understanding, for example, is that the official Saturday Night Live clips on YouTube have been silently edited to remove "problematic" skits.
- addled 3y agoSame, except the one in my hometown hadn't even thrown out the VHS tapes yet. There were still aisles full of early 80s movies in their faded, original edition boxes that had probably been there since the store first opened. I remember finding "Breakin'" (the original, not Electric Boogaloo) in like 2003 when I was still in high school. The owner was a pretty cool dude, I remember apologizing for returning some cheesy sci-fi flick really late after forgetting I had it. He capped my late fees to one day and said "Don't worry about it, you're the only one who ever rents that."
- jimt1234 3y agoYou had me at "Breakin'". That owner is the coolest guy in your hometown. LOL
- jeeeb 3y agoYou can rent movies online though. Steaming catalogs are a moving target but online rental catalogs usually have most stuff available. You also don’t need to drive down to the store and risk getting a scratched up disk that skips over a key scene when renting online. To go back to the OP’s example, Prime has Taking Care of Business available for rental for about $5: https://www.amazon.com/Taking-Care-Business-James-Belushi/dp/B004JRWKH6 https://www.amazon.com/Taking-Care-Business-James-Belushi/dp...
- 38 3y agolooks like its on Disney+ Canada, but agreed that is extremely limited given the age of the film: https://disneyplus.com/movies/taking-care-of-business/1cZIoq2zTWOq https://disneyplus.com/movies/taking-care-of-business/1cZIoq...
- Kim_Bruning 3y agoAnd of course it's available on the pirate bay. As usual, it's a service problem.
- fullshark 3y agoOdd argument, in the heyday of cable TV you had no control over what you could watch, it was just whatever TNT/TBA/USA decided to air that night. Not sure how your anecdote indicates netflix is doing a bad job at being cable tv.
- imgabe 3y agoTrue, the on-demand part is better, but I'm mostly talking about the breadth of the catalog. Turner was able to get broadcast rights to a whole bunch of movies that the studios didn't really know what to do with. This is partly why The Shawshank Redemption is now one of the most beloved movies of all time. It was pretty lackluster at the box office, but then in the late 90s and 2000s it was just on TV all. the. time. A lot of people who might not otherwise have watched it got to see it. On demand is not that helpful if you don't want to watch any of the things that are available.
- passwordoops 3y ago>it's not on any of the four streaming services I pay for (I'm outside the US so ymmv). And why? Why is the studio hoarding access It's not the studio, it's whatever local rightsholder owns it for your country. Where I am (Canada) it tends to be Bell, which is a content creator, ISP, and cable providing monopsonist. If they don't want to sell the rights, or put the price too high, the streaming services won't have it. Long story short, blame your local politically-connected middle man and fire up the torrents
- imgabe 3y agoDon't even get me started on the absurdity that is region-locked content in the age of the Internet.
- schnable 3y agoThe free ad supported streaming services are where these kind of movies are ending up now. Services like Tubi, Freevee, Pluto.
- jancsika 3y ago> Why is the studio hoarding access to this film that probably stopped making them money decades ago when they could just lease out the streaming rights and make something of it? Just wanted to say that's it's surreal to be making a comment in more time than it probably takes to search for and start watching that movie on the Web. There should be a version of the bible where Jesus gets taken to Pilate immediate after pirating the fish and loaves.
- imgabe 3y agoOh, I already found it and watched it. It's just silly it wasn't possible to do that with any of the services I pay for.
- djkivi 3y agoI remember visiting the UK in 2000, and there was a movie on TV that looked familiar, called Filofax. Me and my friends eventually recalled it was the movie called Taking Care of Business in N. America. Interestingly, looking it up just now on Wikipedia it appears to be the first screenplay JJ Abrams wrote.
- imgabe 3y agoIt is! It also had Gates McFadden (Dr Beverly Crusher) and John De Lancie (Q). A surprising amount of Star Trek crossover.
- midasuni 3y agoIn the U.K. I can rent that with a couple of clicks for £3.50 from half a dozen stores including Apple, Amazon and youtube. Inflation adjusted renting the vhs in the 90s cost £5.90.
- Mindwipe 3y ago> Of course, it's not on any of the four streaming services I pay for (I'm outside the US so ymmv). And why? Why is the studio hoarding access to this film that probably stopped making them money decades ago when they could just lease out the streaming rights and make something of it? It will be available to any of those streaming services that the studio deals to take if they want to. But those services buy x number of titles for y amount of money and your film is very obscure and would not get watched enough to justify a streaming service selecting it. It is trivially available for an individual transaction, where the economics of making it available make more sense (but not infinite sense, listing/encoding/ingesting etc are not free, and people assume even the most obscure film generates more revenue than it actually does).
- red-iron-pine 3y agoHulu streaming + a couple of other crappy channels. lots of mid-to-low tier media there, but also some gems. sometimes you just want a sloppy cheeseburger, and same idea in the TV context.