Well, I’ve been waiting for this to happen, and finally it is. Lionsgate Home Video announced earlier this week that Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown with Pam Grier, Samuel L. Jackson, Robert De Niro and Robert Forester is finally coming out on blu-ray DVD, on October 4th.

In the States that is. It’s been available on blu-ray in Poland since 2009. Go figure…

But there’s a catch however. The blu-ray will only be available for the first 4-6 months as a Wal-Mart exclusive. Which means that if you want to get it you have to either buy it at Wal-Mart or order it on-line from Wal-Mart’s website, for at least the first few months after its initial release. After that, it will be available at other stores and venues.

This is not new. Increasingly home video divisions of film studios are making “exclusive only” deals for their upcoming and most likely highly in-demand DVDs with stores such as Wal -Mart and Best Buy. This is happening as DVD-on-demand labels such as Warner Archive, Sony Classics on Request, and MGM Limited Collection Editions are increasing in popularity. Warner Archive itself currently has a list of almost 900 titles of older films available for sale adding several new titles every month.

As the DVD market has plateaued and sales have dropped, DVD companies are looking for new ways to sell their product to a smaller clientele; In other words, dinosaurs like me who actually still buy DVDs and collect them. (I’m desperately trying to find more space for them)

As a result they’re making deals with certain stores to exclusively sell their projects for a limited time. It’s great for the companies because they don’t have to makes tons of copies which don’t sell; and the stores like it too because it brings in new customers. Furthermore, these exclusive blu-rays act as “loss leaders”, which is an item that a store sells at a low attractive price, to pull in buyers. Once they’ve trapped them, they get suckered into buying something else more expensive.

Worked on me, since I had to actually enter a Wal-Mart, way out from where I live, a few weeks ago, to get one of those blu-ray exclusives, and wound up buying something else that I didn’t plan to. DAMN those rat bastards! They caught me!