arahir
i am literally offering $50 to any person who can find a definitive answer to this question: why was the famous movie the name of the rose (1986), starring sean connery, banned in the united states as of november 2020?
EDIT: SOLVED. disney did it.
so it turns out this isn't the only movie this has happened to. see this article:
and then you can see this spreadsheet (go to missing movies) to find others.
thank you to people in the replies for telling me about 20th century fox properties being acquired and shuttered by disney and for the cocoon reference which lead me down the rabbit hole to a definitive answer. disney is really here to fuck us over.
ms-demeanor
Anyway, what I mean is artificial shortages and market manipulation like this are exactly why pirating from Disney is a moral good. Fuck their media monopoly, fuck their Disney Vault, it's a pirate's life for me.
If you're too young to have owned Disney VHS or DVDs, Disney used to only sell the movies for a limited time and then would stop selling them for years at a time. They ran commercials letting people know that it was the LAST CHANCE to buy the movie, once it's gone, it's gone, get it while supplies last! Get it and share it with your kids while they're still young enough to care about the things that made your childhood special!
Now they're doing this to movies they didn't even make.
sule-skerry
This thread has been about home viewing but I'd like to point out that this is also very, very bad for indie movie theaters that do repertory screenings (which is what the Vulture article is about).
A repertory screening is basically an old movie, maybe as part of a series of similar films.
A few movies mentioned in that article that we would have had a guaranteed full house for when I worked in an indie movie theater: Miracle on 34th Street, Alien. The Sound of Music, Fight Club, Die Hard, Planet of the Apes, Indiana Jones – I could go on.
Repertory series are one of the things people come to indie theaters for, plus doing a screening of an older blockbuster like Indiana Jones can help keep the doors open for the first run of a documentary about a Nepalese cable car line (actual film we showed, it was awesome). And it's more fun for YOU, the viewer, to be able to see a film you know and love on a big screen with popcorn and snacks and a room full of people who are just as hyped as you are to watch it.
But Disney wants you to subscribe instead. 🤷♀️
