Re: What about Direct to DVD?
I disagree with your disagreement Joe. B5 is, sadly, a little known commodity when you venture away from conventions and fan sites.
When I venture into Best Buy it is an obviously known commodity because a number of copies of the set are on sale there. When I look at the TV schedules for the past five or six years it is a known commodity because it has been on the air almost every day for every one of those years - which is something that "cult" genre shows simply do not acheive.
It does look like Sci-Fi doesn't have
B5 scheduled after the end of this month. I don't know if they are "resting" the show, suspending it during January because they're doing other programming during a period when regular viewing patterns are distrupted or if they're exclusive contract has run out and not been renewed. If they're "resting" the show because it has "burned out" or even if they've dropped it for that reason, I won't be too upset. If anything I'm surprised that it has taken this long, given that the first four seasons entered heavy rotation in 1998. It was
inevitable the existing fans would tire of watching the reruns on TV (especially with the DVDs) and equally inevitable that few new fans will discover the show at 9 AM ET/PT.
But it has been building an audience steadily since it started in daily reruns, and the DVDs are increasing that audience. It isn't a part of the popular culture that way
Star Trek and
Star Wars are, but it isn't as obscure as
Stargate,
Firefly and
Farscape are. I've seen far more references to
B5 in other TV shows, cartoons and from stand-up comedians than I have references to those other shows.
There isn't a "real" person in my life that I can chat up B5 with.
And that's just one reason why anecdotal evidence from your life in particular is rarely used to make major marketing decisions.
Seriously, that's no way to judge how widespread the interest in something is. The people you know simply aren't a large enough sample to be statistically meaningful. This is the fallacy of generalizing from an unrepresentative group, sometimes known as the "Kael Fallacy." (Named for film critic Pauline Kael who on the day after the presidential election of 1972 complained, in all seriousness, that she couldn't understand how Nixon had won because not a single person she knew had voted for him. Nixon's victory was one of the biggest electoral landslides in U.S. history.)
I don't know a single person who uses heroin, but my police friends assure me that it is still popular and still a multi-billion dollar industry. So
somebody out there must like it, even if I don't run into them on a daily basis. Ditto the Society for Creative Anarchronims, and people who collect beanie babies. The world is a big enough place that something can have millions of followers and still not have more than two in any given town.
The only films that "have" to make $50 million on their opening weekends are films that
cost $100 million or more to make. (Since the rule of thumb is that a film must gross three times its production cost to break even.) That's why films like
Titantic are such momunental gambles. That picture had to be one of the 5 top grossing films of all times just to break even. There is no reason to spend that kind of money on a
B5 picture, and therefore no reason to put that kind of pressure on it. Like I said, if WB controls the budget there is no reason they can't be in the black (by selling overseas, television and other rights) before the picture even opens. (The producer of the star-studded adapation of Cornelius Ryan's WWII book,
A Bridge Too Far did exactly that. Desptie diappointing box office and tepid reviews, the film still ended up making money.)
All the movie has to do is
open. If it is good, word of mouth will bring in more audiences. Probably not one person out of ten who saw either of the
X-Men movies had read one of the comics or even heard of them. The commercials looked cool, the story was accessible, the word of mouth was good. The die hard comics fans opened the first flick, the film itself kept audiences coming back.
And why is everybody constantly beating up on Warner Bros? By and large they've done very well by this show, from taking a chance on doing a non-
Trek SF show in the first place, to getting out of JMS's way and letting him do his story on his terms, to backing him up when things went bad with TNT.
Nobody ever talks about any of this, but everybody makes smart ass comments about every persnickety little problem from the hubs to using the word "season" on the DVD sets to losing the CGI files (admittedly a monumental screw-up, but people talk about it like it was an act of malice directed at them personally.) I've said it before and I'll say it again, SF fans are the whiniest, most annoying bunch of people in the world if the least little thing goes wrong or they don't get exactly what they want. Warner Bros. sunk something like $125 million bucks into
B5, all told. They kept the show on the air, year after year. They tried two home video releases in the U.S. because the fans begged for them (and then had to cancel them when those same fans
stopped buying them) Despite the failure of their first two attempts, they released the show again on DVD and did it just the way most of the fans they'd heard from had asked for it - widescreen, with extras, Dolby Digital sound remixes...
And for all this they get called "spineless toadies" and treated like they are somehow the enemy. This when they're actually paying JMS to write another new
B5 universe project! What is our collective
problem?
Regards,
Joe
