What Is The Cost To Restore A Movie?

[Markxxx]

Obviously this would vary somewhat, but I was just trying to get an idea.

I bought the Blondie series on DVD (these were B-Movies made in the late 30s and 40s) and while I love the series, the DVD was basically just a transfer of what looked like VHS to DVD. While it certainly is watchable, it looks like something I could’ve done with VHS tapes and my own computer.

Now I realize it’s expensive to restore old movies, and there isn’t much of a demand from a B-serial from the 40s, so I was trying to get an idea.

These were black and white films, but I was trying to get an idea of approximately what cost it would be. Maybe a per minute figure per B&W or Color so I could get any approximation.

Thanks

[DesertDog]

Lost Horizon cost millions but that was an extraordinary effort spanning over twenty years. I would imagine a more typical transfer from film to DVD would run from a couple thousand for a straight transfer to tens of thousands if they need to tweak things up – scratch removal and the like.

[MovieMogul]

Cite

“There’s something inherent in preservation that’s painstaking and time-consuming,” Bodde says. “The idea that it’s an ongoing process and should be part of the life cycle of a film is a good message.”

Digital technology thus far has proved a mixed blessing, but even dyed-in-the-wool chemical labs own some digital tools and plan to add more. While digital processes can fix frames that cannot be repaired photochemically, the cost of scanning an entire film into the digital realm for a frame-by-frame correction remains largely out of reach. For that reason, most movies are restored photochemically – a $40,000-$80,000 cost for a black-and-white film ($50,000-$100,000 for a color movie), compared with digital budgets that range from $75,000-$250,000.

Note this was 6 years ago, so the costs will have come down even further, but I am skeptical that a company interested in releasing something as obscure and of niche-interest as the Blondie series would be willing to fork over even $25K per title on such an enterprise–especially since they probably have to sell them cheap anyway (how much did the OP pay?) and need to save most of their costs toward authoring X-thousand of units to distribute.