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Movie Junkie: Boycott Blockbuster
By Jesse Bullington
After a brief hiatus, I come bringing not joyous news of remarkable films but rather apocalyptic portents of misery and woe. While many commendable movies have graced the screens recently, the biggest news in the film industry is the latest Weinstein brothers debacle. These producers – long-despised by connoisseurs of celluloid for their refusal to include original language audio tracks on their domestic releases of foreign titles – have gone beyond the pale with their latest announcement.
And so it came to pass that in the waning days of 2006 my most-hated adversaries formed an unwholesome (and possibly illegal) union with the Blockbuster Corporation. Blockbuster has long stood head and malformed shoulders above the rest of the corporate rental outlets in terms of unscrupulous practices, comparable to Wal-Mart. John Antioco, CEO of Blockbuster, proudly crowed at a shareholder meeting that his company would “collaborate with the devil if it helps our business,” a statement made all the more comical considering Blockbuster’s purported fundamentalist values. Antioco has found his Lucifer(s), and with the Weinsteins’ assistance, Blockbuster now prepares to tighten its stranglehold on independent rental stores.
Having left Miramax, the Weinstein brothers formed the modestly titled Weinstein Company. One of their first actions was to announce their exclusive partnership with Blockbuster. To whit, only Blockbuster is able to purchase and rent films released by the Weinstein company, with all other (predominantly small) rental businesses forced to buy the same movies at a higher cost from retail outlets rather than getting them directly from the Weinstein Company at the standard reduced rate Blockbuster enjoys.
Considering the mainstream titles stocked by the Weinstein Company, smaller rental stores have literally no choice but to purchase these cost-inflated films or else risk losing customers to Blockbuster.
Under the first-sale doctrine, corporations such as the Weinsteins’ cannot legally prevent other rental stores from purchasing films at a retail business and then renting them. However, DVDs that the Weinstein Company sells to retailers all have labels marking them as being only for sale and not for rental. These labels even include a hotline to report rental stores that have (perfectly legally) purchased the DVDs from a retail store and then rented them.
Considering that rental stores can legally buy from a retailer and then rent the film, the purpose of such a hotline is dubious at best. Several independent stores in Massachusetts believe the labels and the accompanying hotline number are to defame any rental business that dares compete with Blockbuster.
The labels intentionally mislead customers into believing that the small rental companies are engaging in wrongdoing when they are legally competing with Blockbuster.
The aforementioned Massachusetts-based companies along with the National Entertainment Buying Group are suing the Weinstein Company for “unfair competition, unfair or deceptive acts and practices, untrue and misleading advertisements, negligent misrepresentation and tortuous interference with advantageous business relations.”
Oh, to live in a perfect world where we could simply sue them for being money-grubbing jerks!
The battle lines are drawn, and I encourage all readers to actively boycott both the Weinstein Company and Blockbuster in retaliation for their small-business-crippling goals and unchecked greed. Failing that lofty goal, find an, ahem, alternative way to view the Weinsteins’ films without actually giving them a penny. Goodnight, and good luck.
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