About DVD extras...

[Evil Genie Jafar]

We all want to have the best DVD edition available for our movies.

We always drool when we find out that the movie we want will have hundreds of extras and hours on extra material.

But after we get that edition, do we really see them all? Or most of them? And if we do, how often do we see them again?

Of course that the main reason for us to buy a DVD is the movie itself. To have it in the best form possible. But we also think about the best edition in terms of extras and then some of us just watch a couple of them, or there are even some that don't even care.

Other times the reason is that they put too much material and we frequent buyers keep buying so much and so often we don't have time for all; in my case I have almost 200 and I know that most of you have much more.

What about the almost 13 hours of extras in Planet of the Apes (2001) and Terminator 2? Not to mention The Lord of the Rings Extended versions?

And that's not even counting the DVD Rom extras that for the most part get forgotten; yeah, I know that most of you just remembered they have them (In this case I wish they wouldn't even make them. It's already a shame that companies put so much added value that most persons don't care as to even add more material here that I could guess almost 90% of the time isn't even touched)

Giving my opinion I guess it depends on the movie and the person. If the movie is one that you like you're going to watch them all. Also it depends if you're the kind of person that says: "if I paid for it I'm going to take full advantage of it" . Or people that just have few DVDS and they have the time to see all the extras.

But to be honest there are times that for example it's not the customer's fault. For example, there are very few times when a movie gets released in both a barebones disc and a special edition (2 disc). Usually they get released in the later. Then you just like the movie, not that much and you know you're not interested in most of the extras but there's no other way of buying it. Other times the extras are just so many that you feel saturated by them. And for example you're watching a 2 hour making of the movie and you know there are still 6 hours left of bonus material that before finishing the 2 hour making of you already get tired or feel the need to just go and watch the movie.

And also if we did see the extras, what are the chances of seeing them again?


I think that's all for me in this post. It's already too much. And the time I spent here I could have used in watching some of extras . I just always had that in mind as you could see and wanted to share it.

Now it's up to you to either agree with me, disagree and/or give more of your opinions.

Here's hoping this post give you time to think about it or made you remember the extras you haven't watched.

[PixarFan]

Well, I do not have a large number of DVDs, so I do not get overwhelmed as easy. I get a DVD or two once every few months, and have time to watch all the bonus features before I get the next set. I have watched almost all of the bonus features for my movies (aside from one or two audio commentaries), and have even viewed all the DVD-ROM content. Several of the movies I have viewed the entire section of bonus content at least twice, and have rewatched my favorite features more than that. So in some ways it is an advantage to not having an abundance of DVDs, because that way I can get more out of the discs I have and will not feel overwhelmed.

[Luke]

There's an interesting article on the DVD industry in today's New York Times magazine. It basically states that while 80% of people don't watch many or most bonus features, the majority will look at the bonus features on the back of the case as a major selling point.

Personally, I guess I'm in the majority, but I love well-done bonus features. On movies I love (which is still the overwhelming majority of my collection), I'll definitely check out all the extras and likely return to them at a later point. DVDs

Commentaries are the exception. Most of the time, I find them enjoyable, but most times, I'd rather just watch the movie with its regular soundtrack.

[Evil Genie Jafar]

Could you give me a link to the article Luke? I searched its web site but didn't find anything.

In my case one of the extras I've found most enjoyable are the audiocommentaries. It serves me for when I'm doing stuff and can't pay full attention to the movie. It also serves me as company. But for the most part I only hear it for animated movies. They tend to be the most interesting ones and you get to know lots of stuff that might not even being included in the other extras. Plus it's fun to hear facts and experiences directly from the people involved in such a casual way and not guided (like on the making of's).

On the other hand, I tried watching the extras on the extended ed. of The Fellowship of the Ring but couldn't because it was too much and too detailed. But now that I think about it I will watch them. Mostly because I get lost in the movies with so many characters and places. So what better way of understanding?

PS

The audiocommentaries on The Simpsons sets are so much fun as watching the episodes themselves.

[Luke]

It's a really big article. Here's the beginning and the link: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/14/movies/14DVD.html

Box Office in a Box
By JON GERTNER

Published: November 14, 2004

I. Get Me Gene Hackman

For the past few years, Hollywood's weekend box-office tallies have come to represent a tidy bit of wisdom about American culture -- cold, bare numbers relayed around the world every Monday morning that tell us which stories and which celebrities are resonating with the moviegoing public. There is, however, another set of Hollywood statistics of enormous significance, and Tuesday is their day. How important are these numbers? Every Tuesday at lunchtime, Mike Dunn and Peter Staddon, the president and executive vice president, respectively, of 20th Century Fox's home-entertainment division, take the elevator from ther 25th-floor offices at Fox Plaza in Los Angeles down to their cars in the underground parking garage and from there drive out into the noontime traffic on their way to Best Buy, Target, Costco and Wal-Mart. Tuesday is the day new DVD's are released, the day Dunn gets a sense of whether the discs that his team has worked on for months -- or sometimes years -- will sell as well as planned. So the Fox executives wander the aisles of the big retailers. They eavesdrop. They size up the clientele. They take note of what's moving through the cash registers. Tuesday, not Monday, is their day of reckoning.

And in many ways, the same is true for their parent company as well. From about 2002 on, the larger stakes in Hollywood -- the revenue that enables studios to finance blockbusters and to pay Brad Pitt and to keep the lights on -- have come to ride mostly on those little silver discs that go on sale four or five months after a theatrical release. This year, for instance, 63 percent of studio feature-film revenues in the United States will come from movies sold to retail stores; actual box office will generate only 21 percent. According to Tom Adams, a well-regarded home-entertainment analyst whose firm, Adams Media Research, tracks DVD sales and trends, studios often get twice as much revenue from a big film's retail sales as they do from its theatrical release.

Rest of the article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/14/movies/14DVD.html

The bonus features talk is only a small portion, but it's all pretty interesting, I think.

[BrandonH]

I make it a point to look at all of the extras on my DVDs at least one time. I even paged through all of the treatments, scripts, and storyboards in the Alien Quadrilogy set. An extra has to be pretty atrocious for me to skip it (e.g., a Raven music video).

The only exception I can think of is the T2: Ultimate Edition DVD. I watched everything besides the mega-supplement group. I figured that I would revisit the mega-supplement later to avoid repetition of material in a short time frame.

I will revisit extras, especially commentaries and well-made documentaries. Some of my favorite documentaries have been on the James Bond special editions, and I usually watch those right before the movie to put me in the mood.

I'm of the mind that studios should put as many extras as they want on DVDs, as long as they do not have a huge impact on A/V quality or price. Exceptions include reissues that are made almost specifically for the extras, such as the Alien Quadrilogy.

Bring on the Ultimate Matrix Collection and Return of the King Extended Edition! I will be busy for days on end, and that is no exaggeration.

[Evil Genie Jafar]

Thank you Luke, it was very interesting.

Now thanks to that it helped me to understand why they put so much material on some DVDS. To help sale the title even if the movie wasn't very good.

People feel tempted by special editions no matter if the movie was good or not. And we've all felt that way. I now most of us have seen a bad or medicocre movie in this outstanding edition and were tempted by it : "it wasn't that bad" or "what a shame. If it wasn't for the movie I'd bought it"

The best example I kind think of right now is Planet of the Apes (2001). I don't really like that movie (like most people) but I have it. The box for the DVD had this hologram cover, with the over 13 hours of bonus features on the back and Wal Mart was even selling it with a bonus CD Rom.... So I fell; of course it helped that I hadn't seen the movie before.

[StevEnrique]

I too always look at what bonus features are on DVDs even if I don't watch them. I bought the first LOTR extended version just cuz I liked the packaging and all the extra stuff even though I hadn't seen the movie and didn't know much about it lol Good thing I liked it after watching.

[Christian]

I'll admit to being razzled and dazzled somewhat by bonus features (especially deleted scenes) but if I don't like a movie I'm generally not going to care about bonus features. Planet of the Apes was alright. A friend rented it (or maybe he bought it) and I watched it with him one time. Didn't have a problem with watching it once but don't really care to see it again and I don't have any interest in its bonus features. I'm always doing so many different things that it is hard for me to ever sit down and watch a movie all the way through so it is especially hard for me to get to the bonus features. Having said that, there are a few DVDs I have where I have watched some of the bonus features more than once. Aladdin has some great stuff on it and I've listened to the animator commentary but still have to listen to the other commentary. And I generally just listen to commentary tracks when I am working my normal day job because it's not as important for me to be paying attention to the visual aspects of the movie when I'm just listening to commentary on a movie I'm already pretty familiar with.

[ThiagoPE]

Thats is a good question evil genie jafar, I, for exaple, like a lot a dvd with a lot of extras but i never watch them more than 2 or 3 times...

[Escapay]

Hmm, I'm not really sure where I'd stand on DVD extras.

On the one hand, you're definitely getting your money's worth because I would never ever pay full SRP on some DVDs I have.

On the other hand, you've seen an extra, and usually that's enough, as opposed to the movie, which you can see over and over again.

On the other other hand, you've got some bonus features you can see again and again like Deleted Scenes, Trailers, etc.

On the other other other hand, some of the extras seem so ridiculously pointless that I don't bother watching them (for example, in POTC I could not sit through any of those "Diaries" extras). Music videos too can sometimes be pointless if done in such a way that it butchers the song (No Secret's Once Upon a Dream on Sleeping Beauty is a good example of how NOT to sing a song. They should burn the original print of that so it's never seen again).

On the other other other other hand, with all those extras, you could definitely find ways to pass the time if you've seen a movie one too many times.

And I'm out of hands.

Anyways, the majority of movies I get, I look for usually just two things:

1. Original Aspect Ratio
2. Trailers (preferably for the movie itself. You have no idea how disappointed I was when the only trailers on Star Trek: Nemesis were for DS9, VGR, and "The Hours")

Video quality, Audio types, Extras, they're fluff to me. So long as I have a good picture, good audio, and the two things mentioned above, I'm a happy DVD camper. Extras are just that, extras. The companies don't NEED to put them on the DVD, they're just added bonuses.

I heard there's gonna be a Special Edition of Ferris Bueller in 2005. I already have the barebones (just the movie and a John Hughes commentary. No trailer, which makes me ), but if the Special Edition has a couple features worth seeing (like deleted scenes mentioned in the commentary, a trailer, and perhaps a where-are-they-now featurette), I'll most likely upgrade.

Escapay

[Jack]

95% of the time, I look at all the extras on the DVDs I buy. I stay away from commentaries, but I almost always watch everything elese - especially on Disney titles. The only times I wouldn't is if I came across some very fluffy promo "extras" on a single disc package, in which case I wouldn't even bother.

[Christian]

I have to say that trailers don't do much for me. I usually check them out if they are on a DVD but if they are not it is no particular loss to me. They are usually just clips from the movie anyways. Sometimes there's something a little different about them. I know every once in a while scenes from a trailer don't make it into the final cut (Truman Show, for instance), and sometimes they purposely make the trailer something completely different from what will be in the movie but that gives you a taste for what it will be like (The Incredibles, for instance) but by and large that is not the case.

[2099net]

Trailers are vitally important to a DVD. Especially "archive" DVDs. It is always interesting to see how a film was sold at the time. I wish more DVDs included poster art and print adverts too.

I always watch Trailers and TV spots if they are present (but I did draw the line about half-way through the Scream 3 TV spots).

I can't say I watch all the supplements on a DVD, but I like to dip into them all and there's lots where I do watch all the supplements. Recently that seems to be UK TV sets more than anything else.

[Disneykid]

I always go through 90% of a movie's extras. Most of the time it's 100%, but there are times where I'm lazy and I don't go through the galleries or listen to commentary. I always watch featurettes, documentaries, deleted scenes, and other video features, though. Whenever I first buy a DVD, I go through the extras multiple times. For example, I've gone through Aladdin's supplements twice already AND listened to the filmmaker's commentary (and I plan on listening to the animator one soon). I may even go through all of the supplements again. Once I've viewed a DVD's extras a few times, I tend to go through them again about once a year or so. So in the end, I love supplements and I'm not one of those people who'll go through some of it once and never again. Extras are very valuable to me and have great replay value, especially if they're high quality.

[Evil Genie Jafar]

It's really interesting to read your answers.

It's fun to see how instructive and interesting this post has gone

You make a real nice collage of what people look forward/watch extras.

But I guess I won a point here: almost no one has mentioned the DVD Rom extras and nobody have told me if they've seen all the extras in both extended editions for The Lord of the Rings.

[Christian]

nobody has told me if they've seen all the extras in both extended editions for The Lord of the Rings.

I have. Even saw them in the theater.

[Escapay]

If I had a DVD-player on my comptuer I'd be able to see the DVD-Rom features.

Escapay

[Disneykid]

But I guess I won a point here: almost no one has mentioned the DVD Rom extras and nobody have told me if they've seen all the extras in both extended editions for The Lord of the Rings.

I've seen all of the video features for both EE's, but I haven't gone through the galleries, and I've only listened to the filmmaker and cast commentaries for both (the technical commentaries don't really interest me, but I may give them a listen one day).

[That1GuyPictures]

Extras are cool and all...but I won't even watch them unless the movie is an all-time favorite of mine.

Besides, the movie is still the thing for me. I buy a DVD to get the best in sound and picture quality. I don't buy DVD's because of the special features. They may encourage a re-purchase from time to time, but for me the film is the thing. The way the movie is presented is 10 times more important to me than any bonus features. However if I had to pick a favorite type of bonus feature it would have to be Deleted Scenes.

My least favorite, (or least watched) bonus features are usually the commentary. Unless a movie is astonishingly good, chances are I won't have the time to listen all the way through a commentary. It's just not worth it to me. I much prefer typed out subtitle tracks so I can choose to read them.

Regaurdless, bonus features are still just BONUS features. I buy a movie because I want the movie. And If I like the movie enough, I'll rebuy the movie again as a special edition and watch the special features. Otherwise I'll probably just sell it on ebay after I'm done, or just return the disc to the store where I rented it.

DVD's were a lot cooler in 1998 before everyone had them...
now I feel like they aren't as special because everybody's got them.