OOP Indicator

Discuss releases by Indicator and the films on them.

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MichaelB
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Re: OOP Indicator

#51 Post by MichaelB » Mon Nov 26, 2018 10:10 pm

It was only ever a BD-only release. Indicator stopped producing DVDs as of October 2017* and Eyes of Laura Mars came out in November.

(*An exception was made for the final Harryhausen volume, for consistency with the earlier ones.)

KJones77
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Re: OOP Indicator

#52 Post by KJones77 » Mon Nov 26, 2018 10:12 pm

Lowry_Sam wrote:
Mon Nov 26, 2018 10:07 pm
So it didn’t have a dvd? It’s still on Amazon UK (blu-Ray only), so I assumed it was already reissued.
No it hasn't been reissued. It is sold out on Indicator's site but the LE may still be available from third party retailers.

A standard edition release date will likely come later on.

rawlinson
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Re: OOP Indicator

#53 Post by rawlinson » Wed Nov 28, 2018 7:49 pm

According to their Twitter feed there's now less than 20 copies of the Sinbad set.

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Florinaldo
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Re: OOP Indicator

#54 Post by Florinaldo » Wed Nov 28, 2018 9:59 pm

Considering how loved the Sinbad movies are by a good chunk of fandom, it's not really surprising that the set would be the first one to sell out, even though it was not even part of their Black Friday sale as I recall, but I may be mistaken (the other two Harryhausen sets were part of it). Third-party vendors will probably have some stock for a while, but it will not be replenished once they run out of those copies.

Speaking of that sale, another tweet from Powerhouse indicates it was such a big success that it will take them a couple of weeks to process the high number of orders that came in. So we should not worry even if we do not get a shipping confirmation for several more days.

rawlinson
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Re: OOP Indicator

#55 Post by rawlinson » Thu Nov 29, 2018 1:45 pm

I think I've been exceptionally lucky then as I've had shipping confirmations on both items that I ordered.

KJones77
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Re: OOP Indicator

#56 Post by KJones77 » Tue Dec 04, 2018 5:47 pm

Sinbad trilogy is now OOP.

Pretty good few weeks for Indicator here. Three OOPs, two near OOPs, and apparently terrific returns in the recent sale.

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MichaelB
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Re: OOP Indicator

#57 Post by MichaelB » Wed Dec 05, 2018 10:40 am

KJones77 wrote:
Mon Nov 26, 2018 7:34 pm
Fat City just sold out on Indicator's site.
Just to update on this one, as it's triggered a bit of confusion, Powerhouse merely went temporarily out of stock on this title during the sale. At the time of writing, Fat City is not OOP.

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Re: OOP Indicator

#58 Post by KJones77 » Wed Dec 05, 2018 2:53 pm

MichaelB wrote:
Wed Dec 05, 2018 10:40 am
KJones77 wrote:
Mon Nov 26, 2018 7:34 pm
Fat City just sold out on Indicator's site.
Just to update on this one, as it's triggered a bit of confusion, Powerhouse merely went temporarily out of stock on this title during the sale. At the time of writing, Fat City is not OOP.
Good to know. I got confused as well. Since it happened during the sale and before they updated the OOP page, it just showed as "sold out" in the same way Laura Mars did so I assumed it had gone OOP.

Thanks for the clarification.

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Re: OOP Indicator

#59 Post by MichaelB » Tue Dec 18, 2018 5:59 am

Powerhouse has confirmed that they're down to their last few copies of the Limited Edition of Night of the Demon - and once it's gone, it's gone.

The Standard Edition will remain available indefinitely, but doesn't come with the 80-page book, the double-sided poster, the box or the reversible sleeve.

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Florinaldo
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Re: OOP Indicator

#60 Post by Florinaldo » Sun Feb 24, 2019 5:25 pm

MichaelB wrote:
Tue Dec 18, 2018 5:59 am
Powerhouse has confirmed that they're down to their last few copies of the Limited Edition of Night of the Demon - and once it's gone, it's gone.
The LE is now officially OOP according to the Powerhouse web site (it was still available a week or two ago). So it took about 4 months for the title, which came out last 22 October, to sell out, no mean feat for a 10 000 copies edition. Does it mean it was the fastest selling release for the label?
Last edited by Florinaldo on Sun Feb 24, 2019 5:26 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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MichaelB
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Re: OOP Indicator

#61 Post by MichaelB » Sun Feb 24, 2019 5:26 pm

Easily.

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What A Disgrace
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Re: OOP Indicator

#62 Post by What A Disgrace » Sun Feb 24, 2019 9:27 pm

I hope this encourages Indicator to do more big fat limited editions, if they have anything else nearly as popular in the pipeline.

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Re: OOP Indicator

#63 Post by NABOB OF NOWHERE » Mon Feb 25, 2019 3:23 am

What A Disgrace wrote:
Sun Feb 24, 2019 9:27 pm
I hope this encourages Indicator to do more big fat limited editions, if they have anything else nearly as popular in the pipeline.
Or a Tourneur box

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DeprongMori
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Re: OOP Indicator

#64 Post by DeprongMori » Mon Feb 25, 2019 6:58 pm

NABOB OF NOWHERE wrote:
Mon Feb 25, 2019 3:23 am
What A Disgrace wrote:
Sun Feb 24, 2019 9:27 pm
I hope this encourages Indicator to do more big fat limited editions, if they have anything else nearly as popular in the pipeline.
Or a Tourneur box
Or a Val Lewton box. (Criterion seems to have really dropped the ball on that one.)

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Florinaldo
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Re: OOP Indicator

#65 Post by Florinaldo » Mon Feb 25, 2019 8:43 pm

What A Disgrace wrote:
Sun Feb 24, 2019 9:27 pm
I hope this encourages Indicator to do more big fat limited editions, if they have anything else nearly as popular in the pipeline.
I am sure the company would also like to have another runaway commercial success like this one. The problem is finding another movie that would be as popular and sell out as quickly, helping to subsidize their more niche titles while adding to the company's bottom line.

Even in the case of Night of the Demon they were not completely sure of what to expect since the initial print run was 6 000, which was then increased to 8 000 and finally to 10 000. It's hard to predict how much of an audience a stacked edition of even a cult title will have. It's even harder to catch lightning in a bottle twice.

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tenia
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Re: OOP Indicator

#66 Post by tenia » Tue Feb 26, 2019 5:42 am

I think it's actually not that hard in the way there are many big sellers around. The issue is getting the right combination of factors down, and that's the main culprit : high visibility title, available rights, incentive for a new release (vs a movie already released humpteen times), etc etc.

But it seems to be very different from market to market. In France, I think WS may have sold 2000 copies of their Tourneur release over 5 years. From here, the appeal of the movie is almost not understandable.

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Re: OOP Indicator

#67 Post by MichaelB » Tue Feb 26, 2019 6:04 am

And of course sometimes hits come completely out of the blue. Five years ago, Arrow was seriously concerned that producing 1,000 copies of the Borowczyk box would be financially overstretching themselves (with eleven discs and a 350-page book, it wasn’t cheap to manufacture), and maybe 500 would make more sense. Indeed, if we’d had even the slightest inkling of how quickly it would sell out we wouldn’t have straitjacketed ourselves into a deal that prevented more than 1,000 copies of the short stories being printed. But them’s the breaks.

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Florinaldo
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Re: OOP Indicator

#68 Post by Florinaldo » Tue Feb 26, 2019 10:36 am

tenia wrote:
Tue Feb 26, 2019 5:42 am
But it seems to be very different from market to market. In France, I think WS may have sold 2000 copies of their Tourneur release over 5 years. From here, the appeal of the movie is almost not understandable.
The French release is very different. No digital bonuses to accompany the two edits of the movie, as compared to the bursting-at-the-seams complement of interviews, analyses and commentary on the Indicator. A specific cultural difference there: commentaries are much less frequent on French releases, even for movies originally shot in French. Other types of digital bonuses are also less numerous on French-language limited releases, with some exceptions of course. The big bonus of the WS is an accompanying book, perhaps also a French bias, which covers some of the same material as other books in French on the director (like those by Frank Lafond or Fernando Ganzo).

Even if one identifies a sure-fire runaway bestseller, there are many factors that need to come together before it's possible to put together an edition as appealing as Powerhouse did. How many people are willing or available to speak about it on camera and have interesting things to say (not a given); the terms one can come to with the rights holder, like number of copies, region coding (the WS is region B, the Indicator region-free), getting together a packaging that will attract buyers and collectors, etc. And also the unpredictability of the buying public as I conclude from MichaelB's remark about the Borowczyk box set.

Another "perfect storm" like this edition is certainly to be wished for, but it will probably be very infrequent.

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Re: OOP Indicator

#69 Post by MichaelB » Tue Feb 26, 2019 10:59 am

Florinaldo wrote:
Tue Feb 26, 2019 10:36 am
Even if one identifies a sure-fire runaway bestseller, there are many factors that need to come together before it's possible to put together an edition as appealing as Powerhouse did. How many people are willing or available to speak about it on camera and have interesting things to say (not a given); the terms one can come to with the rights holder, like number of copies, region coding (the WS is region B, the Indicator region-free), getting together a packaging that will attract buyers and collectors, etc.
We were extraordinarily lucky with Night of the Demon, and for multiple reasons. First of all, the rights had effectively been withheld from the UK market for something like a decade, as Sony only started sub-licensing from the Columbia catalogue very recently - and we knew that there was a lot of demand for this particular title because it was constantly being requested from the likes of Arrow and Eureka on their social media platforms going back a good five or six years, if not longer. While some may have imported the French disc, the total numbers are likely to have been pretty tiny (forums like these significantly skew the perception of how popular importing is, but in my experience it's far less than you'd think). And when Powerhouse teased it in the summer of 2017, the reaction was so positive that it made them think "OK, there's clearly unusual interest in this title, so how about scrapping the original Halloween 2017 single-discer - which at that stage was reasonably well advanced - and really pulling all the stops out?"

And with this title there were plenty of stops to pull out - in fact, very few cheapo horror exploitationers have quite so rich a pedigree. This is why Powerhouse could legitimately hire half a dozen experts (in most cases with very specific areas of expertise) to talk intelligently and interestingly about the film with pretty much no significant content overlap - and that's incredibly rare. And with this particular film, there's also an unusually rich and complex version and distribution history, and one about which numerous myths have sprung up over the decades, so there was the opportunity to correct all that. This is where having people like Ramsey Campbell and especially Scott MacQueen on board was particularly valuable, as they had vivid recall of seeing the shorter cut on both sides of the Atlantic. (Talking of myths, I see that the Wikipedia entry on Night of the Demon still contains numerous errors - if I ever get a spare moment, I might give that whole section a thorough going-over using the Indicator package as a hopefully approved scholarly reference.)

There may be a tiny handful of other films out there that can tick similar boxes, but by definition they're extraordinarily rare.

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tenia
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Re: OOP Indicator

#70 Post by tenia » Tue Feb 26, 2019 1:36 pm

Florinaldo, it might just be a misunderstanding on my side, but surely, most of the interest regarding the Indicator release remains about the movie in HD, and possibly the multiple cuts in HD just after. I don't think it was very different in France, though obviously, the price / content ratio is a non negligible factor.
All this considered, it does look like the movie itself has a much higher appeal in the UK than in France, and by much, which is what I wanted to point out.

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Florinaldo
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Re: OOP Indicator

#71 Post by Florinaldo » Tue Feb 26, 2019 8:27 pm

tenia wrote:
Tue Feb 26, 2019 1:36 pm
most of the interest regarding the Indicator release remains about the movie in HD, and possibly the multiple cuts in HD just after. (,,,)
All this considered, it does look like the movie itself has a much higher appeal in the UK than in France, and by much, which is what I wanted to point out.
Interest motivating buying decisions vary widely amongst people. I would propose that the cuts differing only by aspect ratio are not a major factor for most people. I am one of those who like to compare different AR versions and discuss how much more headspace there is in that one and how the image "breathes" in that shot, only to notice the wasted space in that other sequence. But I believe that for most people the differing ARs are at most a side curiosity.

The high appeal of this release (and a number of other Indicator ones) is the wide breadth of bonuses, appealing to a diversity of potential buyers; someone may be interested by half or two thirds of the contents, and that might have been enough to motivate one to buy it. They can hook some customers with one combination of the bonus contents, and others with a slightly different portion of the same bonuses. It also was the first HD release of the film in the English-speaking market, also a plus.

The film might perhaps be less popular in France (and other French-speaking countries) but there is still sufficient interest in it for the BD Wildside edition to come out some years ago, as well as books in French on Tourneur and his work being published, generally focusing mostly on his fantasy/horror work. However I would not venture to estimate precisely its relative popularity in both linguistic worlds though. But as you say, interest may well be relatively more marginal in French-speaking audiences.
MichaelB wrote:
Tue Feb 26, 2019 10:59 am
We were extraordinarily lucky with Night of the Demon, and for multiple reasons. (...).
Thanks for that post. This BTS info, although I am sure reporting only a fraction of the work and research involved in putting together any release, is always interesting.

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Re: OOP Indicator

#72 Post by KJones77 » Mon Mar 11, 2019 3:22 pm

https://twitter.com/indicatorseries/sta ... 3800087553

4 copies of Eyes of Laura Mars and less than 50 of Bunny Lake Is Missing are left.

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Re: OOP Indicator

#73 Post by Drucker » Mon Mar 11, 2019 3:33 pm

Laura Mars now gone, with an SE on the way.

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Re: OOP Indicator

#74 Post by KJones77 » Sat Mar 16, 2019 1:21 pm

https://twitter.com/indicatorseries/sta ... 02017?s=19

Bunny Lake Is Missing is OOP. SE coming later this year.

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rapta
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Re: OOP Indicator

#75 Post by rapta » Sat Mar 16, 2019 1:45 pm

Interesting stuff is suddenly going OOP now, after warnings some months back. I wonder which other titles are down to their last 50/100/200 copies?

I wish other labels were as upfront about this to be honest. I've noticed a handful of MoC titles have gone OOP in the last year, but no word from Eureka directly on those (i.e. whether they'll be reissued or not). I also wish Arrow would let people know when the first print-run is about to sell out because it often means deciding between a disc with or without the booklet.

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