Paramount Plus is (kind of) saving Grease: Rise Of The Pink Ladies with a DVD and digital release
The Grease prequel was yanked off Paramount+ earlier this month
Aux News DVD
If you happen to be a millennial who has ever lamented the fact that your parents threw out their old, probably quite valuable vinyl record collection, now’s the time to listen to your own advice: hold on to all those childhood DVDs, Blu-Rays, and even VHS tapes. Physical media is back in a big way, and—ironically—it’s because of the streaming economy.
The shelf-lives for new series are getting shorter and shorter. Grease: Rise Of The Pink Ladies—Paramount+’s musical prequel focused on the eponymous Rydell High girl group—was one of the more recent shows to be removed from its platform, only three weeks after airing its first and only season finale. This meant that, until recently, the only way fans were able to actually watch the (very new!) series would be if they had somehow peered into the future and thought to screen-record the entire thing, or happened to board a plane that hadn’t updated its entertainment options for several weeks.
People were pissed, to say the least. Several petitions cropped up. And now, whether or not they actually listened or simply wanted to one-up Disney+ and their silly, DVD-less WandaVision SteelBook, Paramount+ is (kind of) reviving the series with its own physical and digital release—and this one will, presumably, actually have a DVD in it.
Rise Of The Pink Ladies is currently available to purchase digitally on Amazon and the iTunes store for $2.99 per episode (or $19.99 for the season), which is obviously incredibly annoying but is at least cheaper than buying a plane ticket if you’re a fan and need some consolation. The series is also slated for a DVD release on November 7, which will allegedly contain over 30 minutes of special features (per Entertainment Weekly)—another casualty of the streaming era that is in desperate need of a revival. Will Blockbuster be the next returnee? Our fingers are so crossed.
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Pretty soon the streamers will be issuing box set DVDs of their one-season wonders.
Or just, like, a DVD case with no DVD in it!https://www.cbr.com/wandavision-steelbook-no-disc/
There’s actually been an uptick in DVD and CD sales and it’s being driven by young people 18-25. They want to both collect the stuff they like and support the people who created it. This won’t be a anything like the conspicuous consumption their parents indulged in but it may well prove to be a healthy niche market. The head of Kino Lorber was recently interviewed and he said that they are doing very well these days and that much of their sales are to twenty-somethings.
As a person of a certain age, it still blows my mind that vinyl is selling more than CDs. I’m glad people are collecting these things, because it helps it be a bit permanent in the world of fleeting availability online.And also, hopefully Paramount+ will do right by Star Trek: Prodigy and release the rest of it on physical media as well.
“Acktually.”Fuck off, dude — we’ve all seen your worthless takes around here.
Amazon runs a disc on demand service for a limited library. Not sure about the economics of this, but a true breakthrough could include a cross-platform service. I think the increasingly fleeting nature of content could actually be alleviated by such a system (and “reruns” on free ad-supported streaming platforms).
The show became kind of trainwreck in its last few episodes because one of the major cast members just straight up abandoned them and forced those episodes to go through serious rewrites. Don’t ask me how this was legally possible.
I missed this story. Who was that?