Last month, an immense career retrospective came out on DVD. It’s called Clint Eastwood: 35 Films, 35 Years at Warner Bros. The set comprehensively covers Eastwood’s career, from actor to Oscar-winning director.
I haven’t seen it, but I found reading reviews enlightening, because of how they illustrate the difference between customer and studio expectations. They also demonstrate how savvy the public has become about audience analysis and other topics that used to only be the domain of marketing reps and product executives. For example, from one Amazon review,
Given that many of these movies are already available for under 10 bucks each, this is still a cheap way to buy all of his movies for anyone that is that big a fan but who doesn’t already own them. I’m a bit confused as to who they are marketing to? … for somebody who owns virtually none of his movies and suddenly wants to spend over a hundred bucks (that seems a mutually exclusive notion), it’s a good value.
That’s a good question. Most fans will already have some if not most of these films, although there are extras with this package, including a booklet, a new short documentary on Eastwood, and upscale packaging. Will the new customer drop this much money for a career overview, given that it omits a few of his classic films, like Play Misty for Me or the “Man With No Name” movies, that were done at other studios?
The long-time fan seems unhappy. The biggest complaint is that, probably to save space, this set contains mostly “flipper discs”. That means 16 of the 19 discs aren’t labeled (well, they probably have tiny writing around the spindle hole), since the DVDs have content on both sides and thus can’t have images on the face. They’re seen as less stable and easier to mar with fingerprints. Plus, there are complaints about the book design, with pockets for the discs in the pages, which makes it hard to get them in and out without minor scratching.
Some of the movies included are the “Dirty Harry” films, Every Which Way But Loose, Bird (the first in the set directed by him that he didn’t appear in), Unforgiven, The Bridges of Madison County, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Space Cowboys, Million Dollar Baby, and the most recent, Gran Torino. The set is also available for download, which the studio likes because that doesn’t involve production costs.
It’s very unusual these days for one star to have such a lengthy, substantial body of work at one studio, and that’s worth celebrating with a lavish memento. There is a market for such retrospectives, but only if they’re done right, in a way that will appeal to the high-end customer. Cutting costs on an expensive gift set may seem smart to a budget-watching decision-maker, but if it disappoints those knowledgeable fans who form the core audience for such projects, everyone winds up disappointed. They’ll not only pass on buying it, they’ll tell everyone they can why.
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