“…And The Greedy Film Producers”

Those goblins at Gringotts (read: Warner Bros) responsible for rolling out the now complete collection of Harry Potter DVDs have taken a leaf from the House of Mouse and issued a recall on all Harry Potter DVDs and boxsets (including the recent eighth, and last, installment, The Deathly Hallows Part 2) from the end of December 2011.

They favour releasing them only in special editions and at certain times from 2012 on, as Disney does with its collection of animated classics.

This is why, when you march into your local DVD store online, or in real life, you won’t find any of Disney’s hugely popular animated classics for sale, unless ‘The Vault” (where they also keep Walt’s dessicated carcass) has dropped a new, extra-special, extra-expensive, for-a-limited-time-only edition of one or other of their fifty cartoon hits. Once it’s gone, it’s gone, until they release the next one.

Already the world’s most popular film franchise, Potter will presumably follow this route, releasing multi-disc versions of the 8 blockbusters on a drip-feed to add to their already US$12,1 billion hoard.

This won’t affect other format releases, such as Pay-Per-View, electronic sell-through, or games, nor is it clear what the schedule for releasing the soon-to-be hard to find Potter collection will be. And they wonder why people pirate movies on the Internet! Mudbloods!

[Source: Deadline]