At That Price, You Might as Well Buy

Ten bucks doesn’t buy what it used to at the video store.

It buys more.

Hoping to further spur impulse purchases in the energized sell-through market, several major studios are formally putting their brands on newly created lines of select catalog titles that will retail for less than $10 each.

While this budget price is not unprecedented (particularly for B-movies in the public domain), the perceived quality of the titles being offered at this price is. Video collectors can choose among Oscar winners, Hollywood classics, contemporary favorites, art-house sleepers and star-powered movies.

Sell-through business is no longer concentrated during the year-end holiday gift-giving months. Last month alone saw the release of “Babe,” “The Baby-Sitters Club,” “Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls” and “The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh,” each retail-priced for less than $20. Disney’s “The Aristocats” will premiere April 24, with “Jumanji” and “It Takes Two,” starring the Olsen twins, scheduled for release in May.

Nor is the sell-through market limited to fitness and family fare. It has expanded to include more adult-themed titles that are deemed to be collectible. Fox-Video is releasing “Waiting to Exhale” on April 23 for the suggested retail price of $19.95.

The in-store traffic generated by these high-profile releases offers studios an opportunity to spotlight catalog titles that may be, in the tactful words of one studio executive, “underappreciated,” or whose prime rental days have long passed. For a retail price of less than $10, even “Clambake,” starring Elvis Presley, can “kick butt,” says Blake Thomas, senior vice president of marketing for MGM/UA Home Video.

To score a knockout in this market, it pays to have “Rocky” in your corner. To commemorate the 20th anniversary of its heavyweight franchise, MGM/UA next week will re-release for a limited time all five “Rocky” films for the suggested retail price of $9.98 each in remastered and repackaged editions.

For the first time, the series will also be available in a boxed set for $39.92 and will include a collector’s booklet. The “Rocky” films normally sell for $14.95 each, and it is expected that at the new budget price, the series is really gonna fly.

“Given the popularity of the collection, we wanted to offer all five films at a good value for consumers,” Thomas says. “This allows us to expose ‘Rocky’ to the broadest audience.”

The “Rocky” promotion is being offered concurrently with MGM/UA’s budget-priced “Movietime” collection, launched earlier this year with such titles as “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” and “The Russia House.”

Joining the collection April 24 will be “Fatal Beauty,” starring Whoopi Goldberg; the ensemble comedy “Once Upon a Crime”; “Rush,” starring Jennifer Jason Leigh; “Shattered,” starring Tom Berenger; and “Still of the Night,” starring Meryl Streep.

The target audience is not so much the beginning collector as “those who have embraced video and integrated it into their way of life and want to buy more,” Thomas says. “By lowering the price barrier, we feel we are opening the door to high-quality films they might have missed.”

Breaking the $10 barrier is an aggressive pricing strategy that complements a recent trend toward creating market segment collections with consistent release schedules, the better to foster consumer loyalty and carve out valuable retail shelf space.

“Twentieth Century Fox Selections” is one of several branded lines established by FoxVideo. Every three months, a dozen titles are re-priced for a limited time at $9.98 each. The most recent batch includes “Only the Lonely,” “All That Jazz” and “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” with “The Abyss,” “Hoffa,” “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” and “The Beverly Hillbillies,” among others, to be added next month.

“Our catalog is a huge priority for us,” says Bruce Pfander, senior vice president of marketing for Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, who estimated that catalog sales account for 20% of the division’s revenue. “Establishing branded lines is a way of programming a catalog, much like what Nickelodeon does with ‘Nick at Night’s’ classic television programs.”

FoxVideo appeals to different niches with its “Family Features” collection and the star-driven “Premiere Series,” whose titles retail for $14.95 to $19.95.

Budget-priced collections, the studios insist, do not cheapen the rest of the catalog (MGM/UA and Fox scored recent sales successes with their James Bond and “Star Wars” collections, respectively). They simply appeal to another segment of the audience, one that, thanks to home video, is more movie-literate.

“The $9.98 price point is the right price for this tier of catalog titles,” Pfander says. “The further you get from the original release date, the greater the competition for shelf space. These are terrific titles that through time don’t command as high a price. But to maintain the price-value perception of our catalog, $9.98 is not a permanent price. This is a special price for a limited time, and we mean it.”

The films that benefit from budget-pricing, Thomas says, are such “underappreciated” titles as “Blue Steel,” starring Jamie Lee Curtis, and “Not Without My Daughter,” starring Sally Field, which Thomas said is one of “Movietime’s” biggest sellers.

Both, he says, have strong appeal to women, who traditionally make the video-buying decisions.

Other studios are also getting into the act. Walt Disney Home Video recently released a grab bag of live-action titles, each retail-priced for $9.99, including “Splash,” “Beaches,” “Three Men and a Little Lady,” “Captain Ron” and “Baby, Secret of the Lost Legend.”

“These are movies that were already re-priced at sell-through,” says Tania Moloney, Buena Vista Home Video’s vice president of publicity and event marketing. “We feel they can have another life for retail in this particular category.”

In June, Columbia TriStar Home Video will release for $9.95 each an eclectic array of catalog titles, including “The Blue Lagoon,” “Fail-Safe,” “Shampoo,” “Taxi Driver,” “Brian’s Song,” “The Big Chill,” “La Bamba,” “Starman,” “ . . . And Justice for All” and “The Jagged Edge.”