Supply and OnDemand

The pricing of movies -- from their theatrical release through their ultimate arrival in the cheap bin at the drug store -- is like a lesson in Economics 101.

When the demand is highest for a movie, its cost is also going to be highest. This is why a shitty movie that was just released can actually be $19.99 (or more) on DVD, and maybe even ten bucks more than that on BluRay. The perceived novelty of it drives up the price. A year later, that same shitty movie may be worth only five bucks in either format. It's all a matter of waiting it out.

The same is true for catching a movie in rented format. Earlier this fall, Universal played around with the idea of charging customers $60 to rent Tower Heist the same day it hit theaters (or very soon afterward). The idea was that the price would seem reasonable because the demand is so high for a just-released studio film to be available immediately in your own home. Films that are a month old, but haven't hit DVD yet, can be bought in a hotel room for usually $12.99 or so. Then the price goes down once they've hit DVD, usually to either $4.99 to rent it on pay-per-view (OnDemand), or essentially free as a Redbox rental (just over a buck) or part of your monthly Netflix plan.

Theatrical also works this way to some extent. Within the same theater, ticket prices usually stay the same from the time the movie arrives until it leaves. However, you might get to pay a bit less by waiting a couple weeks, if there's a theater that shows second-run movies near your house. (Too far away, and you're sacrificing your savings on the ticket by paying more for gas.)

What I really want to concentrate on today, however, is rentals. Universal may have scrapped its plan to charge $60 for Tower Heist, but the idea may have been right, especially for someone like me, who can only get out to the theater a finite number of times. Especially when I place a premium on watching the movie before the middle of January.

I've been an unusually high customer of VOD (video on demand) for about the past month, and it has everything to do with getting to watch a movie at home now rather than waiting until it comes on DVD (probably in February or March). See, I try to watch all the movies of significance that I can from a given release year before the morning the Oscar nominations are announced -- which will be January 24th in 2012. That's when I finalize my list of rankings from first to worst, and in order for the list to seem complete, I'd like movies from November and December to be (almost) as well represented as movies that came out in March or April.

But that second group has the distinction of being available to watch on DVD whenever I want. The first group does not.

And so it is that I've been like a heat-seeking missile, focusing on movies currently in theaters that are also available at home on my TV right now. It's this mentality that has led me to pay a combined total of $23.97 to watch Melancholia ($9.99), The Human Centipede 2: Full Sequence ($6.99), and most recently (this past weekend), Margin Call ($6.99).

I guess it's better than paying $60 for Tower Heist.

Actually, I've liked all three movies to varying degrees. (Yes, even Human Centipede.) And if I'd gone to see them in the theater, those movies might have cost me more like $40 rather than $24.

But only Melancholia is a movie I might have actually seen in the theater. With the others, it was all about trying to make my list of year-end rankings seem more comprehensive.

I guess I should tell you that traditionally, I'm a bit puritanical when it comes to using pay-per-view, or OnDemand, or video on demand, whichever term is really the correct one. I'm generally not willing to pay the extra couple bucks for the convenience of being able to watch a movie on the spur of the moment, rather than waiting for it to arrive through Netflix or going to a Redbox kiosk to pick it up. In fact, I'm the guy who will go to incredible lengths to be sure I don't pay a late fee for a rental, or don't let my Netflix rentals sit around too long collecting dust on the coffee table. I'm always conscious of the margins, if you will.

But with Margin Call and the others, the demand truly did win out. These movies released theatrically in October (or with Melancholia, November) carry an extra value to me in that they contribute slightly more to my certainty that I've surveyed the complete list of available options from a given release year before determining which movie I like best (or worst). And in each case I was able to watch it at a time when a theatrical screening wouldn't have been possible -- with Melancholia and Centipede, it was late at night, and with Margin Call it was during the day while I was watching my son. (See, I didn't think I should subject him to the grotesqueries of Human Centipede, which certainly has me in the running for Father of the Year.)

However, I should say that I'm glad not all movies are made available this way. It could get very expensive for me very quickly.

Then again, isn't part of being a movie fanatic that you can't count your pennies too much? If you're like me, you've probably made the determination that it just costs what it costs to see movies. If you're determined to see a movie in the theater in 3D, and it costs $16.50, well then that's just what it costs. If we were model train lovers, we might spend $20 on a row of bushes to go alongside the tracks. But our hobby is movies, and so we spend that twenty bucks on a movie and a popcorn instead.

If you are counting your pennies, you can always wait until DVD -- but then what would you talk about at cocktail parties?

However, the characters in Margin Call itself probably wouldn't have been too happy with me. I bought their security at an increased price despite seeing it in a compromised format (at home rather than on the big screen), and don't even have any assets to show for it -- not even the toxic asset of a DVD that'll take up space on my shelf.

Guess it's good that I'm a film critic rather than a day trader.

Demanding to be seen

In a normal year, there was about an 11 percent chance I'd see a movie like Gigantic.

It was a small indie with a limited release in early April, albeit with a recognizable cast (Paul Dano, Zooey Deschanel, John Goodman). Even if it had been on my radar, which it wasn't, this poster -- going for a cool retro design, but ending up seeming kind of uncertain about itself -- probably would have killed my desire to see it. And rightly so -- but more on that in a moment.

In 2009, however, there was a 100 percent chance I would see Gigantic, for one simple reason: It was available on Showtime OnDemand.

OnDemand is the most organic tool available to me in trying to forge this random array of 2009 movies for my list that closes on Tuesday. It involves the perfect storm of randomness: maximum availability, minimum choice.

As I said a couple days ago, watching as many movies as I can from 2009 in order to rank them is kind of my way of artificially simulating the experience of a full-time critic. In my ideal way of envisioning it, this is a regular working stiff critic, not a famous critic, not the kind of critic who can opt out of seeing a particular dumb comedy or teen romance if he thinks it's beneath him. The kind of critic I'm envisioning gets assigned a movie and goes to it, because that's his job.

But with 95% of the movies I've seen this year, it's been my choice to see them. I've had to choose to go to the theater to see them, choose to rent them from Blockbuster, or choose to pick them out at the library. The notable exceptions, of course, are the films I was actually assigned to review, the ones where I had little to no knowledge of them before I walked into the screening room -- Lymelife, Death in Love, The Escapist and Soul Power were a couple of those titles from 2009.

And then you have the OnDemand movies. The majority of movies made available through OnDemand are decidedly second-run. They may be decent movies, but most of them are between one and three calendar years old. There are older movies randomly on there as well -- for some reason, one of the two OnDemand stations I have (HBO being the other) has been showing the 1996 George Clooney-Michelle Pfeiffer romantic comedy One Fine Day. Why that movie out of all the movies released in 1996? Who knows. It's a contract thing.

You'd think OnDemand would carry all the movies HBO or Showtime is playing at that particular time, but it doesn't. Or maybe it does, but HBO and Showtime just don't have that many movies from the current year, because there's a delay of a couple more months after they're first available on DVD before the pay cable stations start getting them. A few of the newest releases do creep in, however. And since that number is so modest and manageable, I make a special effort to see all of them, based on those two factors I described earlier -- maximum availability, minimum choice.

I started this last year, when films like George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead, Over Her Dead Body and Definitely, Maybe entered my list of rankings based on this method. This year?

1) Gigantic (2009, Matt Aselton). A purely bogus film full of Sundance-ready eccentric quirks. I could give you a lot of funny specific criticisms that would make you laugh if you'd seen it, but since you probably haven't, I'll spare you. Suffice it to say that a bunch of kooky stuff happens with little interconnectedness, and much trying of patience. One of its most telling problems is that the title has no thematic bearing on the movie whatsoever.

2) The Uninvited (2009, Charles & Thomas Guard). Talked about this a bit a couple days ago. Uninspired, unoriginal ... well, you remember my riff on it.

3) The Soloist (2009, Joe Wright). This was actually better than I was hoping it would be. I did have some hope, since Wright directed the excellent Atonement, but the film was originally supposed to be released for the 2008 Oscar season, before being delayed to the spring, which is never a good sign. My wife had been a driving force to see this, so we might have seen it anyway, but we missed our chance in the theater. Its availability OnDemand made it a certainty.

4) He's Just Not That Into You (2009, Ken Kwapis). A film I'd planned to see on my plane trip back from Australia -- in fact, my definition of the perfect plane film. As I discussed earlier this month, its 130-minute running time took it out of contention for the plane, so OnDemand helped me fill that hole once I got home. And I actually was sort of charmed by this film -- falls into that same embarrassing-but-I-have-to-admit-it category as The Proposal.

There was one other film I was supposed to see, and actually started watching, but didn't finish:

5) Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 (2008, Kevin Rafferty). And you'll probably notice already, from the year I put in the brackets, why I didn't watch it. There's some debate about what year this film belongs to, and in fact, OnDemand itself put the year 2009 in brackets next to the title. But I have ultimately decided it's 2008 rather than 2009. It was released in some capacity in 2008 -- maybe only New York City. But as long as it gets more than a film festival release in a particular year, it belongs to that year, in my opinion. Two things ultimately helped me decide: 1) when I went to Rotten Tomatoes, I found a bunch of reviews of it by New York critics that were posted in November of 2008. The rest were in the spring of 2009, when it hit other cities, but the mere fact that the New York critics reviewed it means it wasn't just a festival release; 2) perhaps more importantly, the game portrayed in the film was in 1968, so it makes sense that this documentary would have been released for the 40-year anniversary of that game. So instead of getting into another situation like last year, when I included Taxi to the Dark Side on my list only to realize a few hours later that it didn't qualify according to our rules as we understood them, I decided to take the worry out of my hands by discontinuing my viewing after 20 minutes, and just postponing it to a time when rankings were not at stake. (Sorry Don -- you can rule as you see fit on this one.)

There may have been 2009 OnDemand movies that I missed back in November or December. After all, these films have a limited lifespan, then they disappear -- He's Just Not That Into You is actually no longer available.

Then again, that's all part of my perfect randomness as well.