THB #493: Vault Disney Moves To Culver City

The history of Home Entertainment distribution has a wild and wavy one.

Every studio has a long and complicated story. Disney, under Bill Mechanic, was the most famous story in the VHS era, as they came up with the system of releasing a couple classic titles each year and then “putting them back in the vault” for 7 years, starting all the way back in 1982. Warners Home Entertainment has been entwined with MGM’s library since 1990. Fox’s Home Entertainment strategy has changed a bunch of times, including the company dragging its feet on DVD and then, diving in deep for a while. The Ben Feingold era at Sony Home Entertainment is one of Hollywood’s great rise and fall stories, as the division got very aggressive when things got hot, including being a leading pusher of the marketing spends for DVD releases to the same level of theatrical releases.

Physical media zoomed to dominance in the early 2000s, with sell-thru DVD sales outpacing theatrical revenues for a few years, then peaking and …