Imitation of Life (1959)

I requested Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life (1959) from Blockbuster Online. I received it from the Blockbuster store in Havelock, NC. I scanned it and posted about it, because I hadn't seen one from that store before. Silly me, I left the envelope, with the disc inside, in the scanner. Days later, when I couldn't find it around the house, I assumed I hadn't received it, so I reported to Blockbuster that it was missing! (I was having a blonde-hair day. I'm sorry). Anyhow, they shipped it once again from another Blockbuster store, this time in Statesville, NC. In my experience, it's unusual to get a movie from a store, and not a distribution center, let alone the same title twice in a row. This got me thinking "why?"

This movie is probably out of print. It was released on DVD in 2003. As with book publishing, I'm guessing that DVDs are printed in "runs" of a fixed number of copies. They sell that amount to retailers and distributors like Netflix and Blockbuster. If they don't rent or sell fast enough, then the studio quits making them. When those original discs wear out, break, or get stolen, they are gone forever, unless the studio decides to do another print-run.

This would explain why Netflix doesn't rent titles that are available elsewhere, like Amazon. If it's available at Amazon, it's at a price too high for Netflix to pay. If Netflix did scramble around, trying to buy up every single copy of every out-of-print title, they would drive prices even higher. There is no financial incentive, and too great a financial risk, for Netflix to supply expensive titles. Such titles have the same risk of being lost, broken, or stolen, as every other title, except they cost 10 times as much. (Nicheflix solved this problem by giving these titles special handling, via their a la carte option).

I'm guessing that Blockbuster stores still have copies of these classic titles that are no longer being printed, the same way your local library is full of out-of-print books. Blockbuster Online can't obtain any more new copies, but they can "borrow" them from their bricks and mortar stores, which is my theory as to why both copies of Imitation of Life came from stores in NC.