Dreamworks Animation Blu Rays?

Cafe Society
1

Anyone know what the deal is with Dreamworks Animation and their blu ray releases?

Their franchise series - the Shrek, Madagascar, and Kung Fu Panda movies - have all been released on blu ray. And their more recent movies - Bee Movie, How to Train Your Dragon, Megamind, Monsters vs. Aliens, Rise of the Guardians - are also available on blu ray. But none of their non-franchise movies prior to 2007 - Antz, Flushed Away, Joseph: King of Dreams, Over the Hedge, The Prince of Egypt, The Road to El Dorado, Shark Tale, Sinbad, Spirit - have had a blu ray release.

Now I’ll grant you some of these were not overwhelming successes. But they were popular enough to release on VHS and DVD, so why not blu ray? Is there some obscure rights problem? Has Dreamworks got some master plan on scheduling? Did it just slip their mind?

2

That time line is about the time when Dreamworks was bought by Paramount. (Viacom) So the movies before that may be in some sort of “rights limbo”.

Or they may just not be interested.

3

If it was a straight cut-off at 2007, I could see it. But they have released early movies like Shrek and Madagascar so it must be possible for them to do it if they want to.

4

Two reasons…

  1. It takes time and money to release a movie for Blu-ray. If they don’t believe the movie will sell well enough to justify this expense, they won’t do it.

  2. Studios don’t want to flood a new format with all of their catalog titles at once. They want to spread it out. Look at the early days of DVD. Stuff like Jurassic Park, Back to the Future, The Terminator, Die Hard, etc, etc, etc were all released at varying points in the format’s first few years (and some much later). It wasn’t for lack of demand or forgetfulness, the studios just didn’t want all of their big releases fighting for the same chunk of consumer spending.

5

Also keep in mind that, at first, Paramount and Dreamworks were in the HD-DVD camp in the HD disc wars (Shrek was originally an HD-DVD only release).