NAVIGATING FORMATS AND PLATFORMS WITHIN MEDIA CONSUMPTION Edited by Jonathan Wroot & Andy Willis DVD, Blu-ray and Beyond “The volume makes a great addition to the important investigation that reveals how the medium that carries the film to the consumer plays as important a role as the aesthetic features of the film text.” —Dina Iordanova FRSA, Professor of Global Cinema and Creative Cultures, University of St Andrews, Scotland “As the digital distribution revolution rolls on, it is easy to overlook the impor- tance of optical disc formats and the role they have played -- and continue to play -- in media distribution. This thought-provoking collection provides a timely exploration of the cultural and industrial legacies of the DVD, and the ongoing interplay between physical and digital media formats. Highly recommended for anyone interested in the past, present, and future of home entertainment.” —Ramon Lobato, RMIT University, author of Shadow Economies of Cinema Jonathan Wroot · Andy Willis Editors DVD, Blu-ray and Beyond Navigating Formats and Platforms within Media Consumption Editors Jonathan Wroot Andy Willis University of Greenwich University of Salford London, UK Salford, UK ISBN 978-3-319-62757-1 ISBN 978-3-319-62758-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-62758-8 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017951531 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 This work is subject to copyright. 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Cover credit: Andrew Regam/Getty Images Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland C ontents 1 Introduction 1 Jonathan Wroot and Andy Willis Part I The Continuing Significance of Discs in Film Consumption 2 Disneyizing Home Entertainment Distribution 15 Jason Scott 3 ‘Now I Am the Master’: Home Video, Canon, and Authorship Among George, Lucasfilm, Fox, and Fans 35 Andrew James Myers 4 Combining Nemo: Pixar Home Media and the DVD of Narrative Integration 53 Christopher Holliday 5 Letting the Fans Be Involved: Third Window’s Cultivation of an Audience for Disc Releases 73 Jonathan Wroot v vi CONTENTS 6 The Education Market for Screen Media: DVD in a Time of Digital Abundance 93 Ruari Elkington Part II Contexts: Patterns of Distribution, Exhibition and Consumption 7 Film Distribution: A Changing Business 115 Roderik Smits 8 The Rise of the Feature Documentary—Fact or Fiction? 135 Shane O’Sullivan 9 Up All Night: The Shifting Roles of Home Media Formats as Transmedia Storytelling 159 Matthew Freeman and William Proctor 10 Box Sets on the Set-Top Box: The Promotion of on Demand Television in Britain 177 Sam Ward 11 A Labour of Love: Fantrepreneurship in Home Video Media Distribution 197 Oliver Carter 12 ‘To Own or not to Own?’ Home Video Devices, Applications, Formats, and the Family Decision-Making Process Behind the Viewing Choice 215 Ksenia Frolova Index 237 e C ditors and ontributors About the Editors Jonathan Wroot is a Lecturer at the University of Greenwich. He teaches classes within film and media studies. His previous research con- cerns the distribution and marketing of Japanese cinema and he has pub- lished numerous journal articles on the topic in Arts and The Market, The East Asian Journal of Popular Culture, Frames, and Participations. Andy Willis is Reader in Film Studies at the University of Salford, UK, and Senior Visiting Curator for Film at Home, Manchester, UK. He is a co-author of The Cinema of Alex de la Iglesia (2007), and the editor of Film Stars: Hollywood and Beyond (2004). He is also the co-editor of Defining Cult Movies (2003), Spanish Popular Cinema (2004), East Asian Film Stars (2014), and Chinese Cinemas: International Perspectives (2016). Contributors Oliver Carter is a senior lecturer in media and cultural theory at the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research, Birmingham City University. His research focuses on alternative economies of cultural pro- duction; forms of industry that are often removed from a formal cultural industries discourse. He has published work that appears in Murders and Acquisitions: Representations of the Serial Killer in Popular Culture vii viii EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS (A. MacDonald, ed.), The Piracy Effect (R. Braga and G. Caruso, eds.), Preserving Popular Music Heritage: Do-It-Yourself, Do-It-Together (Sarah Baker, ed.) and is the author of the forthcoming monograph Making European Cult Cinema: Fan Enterprise in an Alternative Economy, published by Amsterdam University Press. He is currently working on a book about the British adult film industry, this research informing a forthcoming documentary about the British adult filmmaker Mike Freeman titled Hardcore Guaranteed (Rose Tinted Productions). Ruari Elkington is an Associate Lecturer within the school of Creative Practice at Queensland University of Technology. He completed his undergraduate degree in Film and TV with First Class Honours at QUT and received his Ph.D. (The Education Market for Documentary Film: Digital Shifts in an Age of Content Abundance) through the ARC Centre of Excellence in Creative Industries and Innovation. He is strongly grounded in the industry context of film distribution with a focus on documentary content. Other research areas include digital screen content and cineliteracy. Matthew Freeman is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at Bath Spa University, and Director of its Media Convergence Research Centre. He is the author of Historicising Transmedia Storytelling: Early Twentieth-Century Transmedia Story Worlds (2016), Industrial Approaches to Media: A Methodological Gateway to Industry Studies (2016), and the co-author of Transmedia Archaeology: Storytelling in the Borderlines of Science Fiction, Comics and Pulp Magazines (2014). His research examines cultures of production across the borders of media and history, and he has published in journals such as The International Journal of Cultural Studies, the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, and the International Journal of Communication. Ksenia Frolova is Lecturer in Media, Film and Television at Edge Hill University. She has recently completed her Ph.D. at the University of East Anglia. Her doctoral project was an audience study that examined the use of media technology in the context of contemporary parenting in the UK. Ksenia’s research interests include digital television, media audiences, social media, media technology, gender politics and feminist theory. Christopher Holliday is Teaching Fellow in Film Studies at King’s College London specialising in film genre, international film history and EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS ix contemporary digital media/animation. He has published several book chapters and articles on animation, including work that examines child voice acting in computer-animated films and representations of the ani- mated house. More recently, he has published articles on contempo- rary digital animation in Animation Practice, Process & Production and animation: an interdisciplinary journal. He is currently writing a mon- ograph on style and genre in the computer-animated film, and is co-edit- ing a collection of essays that examine the intersection between fantasy and animation. Andrew James Myers is a Ph.D. candidate in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts, where his dissertation focuses on corporate self-reflexivity in the media industries. He previously served as co-editor-in-chief of the Mediascape journal, and assisted in the creation of Lantern and the Media History Digital Library, two award-winning online research tools for archival media history. His research interests include media industries and production culture, archival film and television history, new media, and documentary. Shane O’Sullivan received his Ph.D. at Roehampton University and is a Lecturer in Filmmaking at Kingston University, London. His pro- fessional experience as a documentary filmmaker includes three feature documentaries (RFK Must Die, Children of the Revolution and Killing Oswald) exploring political assassination and terrorism, all theatrically released and broadcast worldwide. He has distributed six documentaries in UK cinemas through his production company/DVD label E2 Films and lectured in film distribution at Birmingham City University before his appointment at Kingston. He also experienced Japanese film distribu- tion when his film Children of the Revolution was released in thirty cin- emas there in 2014. William Proctor is Lecturer in Media Culture and Communication at Bournemouth University, UK. He is the author of Reboot Culture: Comics, Film, Transmedia (Palgrave, 2018). William has published arti- cles and book chapters on popular culture including Batman, James Bond, The Walking Dead, One Direction fandom, and Star Wars. His research interests include transmedia storytelling, adaptation, reboot- ing, franchising, and reception studies. William is currently co-editing the collections (with Richard McCulloch), Disney’s Star Wars: Forces x EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS of Production & Promotion and Disney’s Star Wars: Forces of Reception and Participation (University of Iowa Press, 2018); The Scandinavian Invasion: Critical Perspectives on Nordic Noir (Peter Lang, 2018); and with Matthew Freeman, Transmedia Earth: Critical Perspectives on Global Convergence Cultures (Routledge, 2018). William is director of ‘The World Star Wars Project’ and, alongside Matthew Freeman, co- director of the Transmedia Earth Project. Jason Scott is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Leeds Trinity University. His current research focuses on contemporary animation, the Star Wars franchise, and the Iger-era Disney company more generally. He is also beginning research on contemporary franchise adaptations in film and television. The latter relates to his continuing research on the historical development of the character-oriented franchise in film and related media. Roderik Smits is a doctoral candidate in the department of Theatre, Film, and Television at the University of York. His research focuses on the changing nature of film distribution. He is a member of the MeCETES research project (www.mecetes.co.uk), exploring the circula- tion of contemporary European film and television drama. Sam Ward is a Senior Analyst at cultural insight consultancy Canopy. He completed a Ph.D. in the Institute for Screen Industries Research at the University of Nottingham. His thesis focused on the role of transna- tional trade in content in the branding of British digital television chan- nels and technologies. He has also lectured on the media industries at the universities of Roehampton and Derby.