Once again, does Blockbuster pay the studios to cut out all the bad stuff?
Nope. Blockbuster didn’t commission anything. They didn’t need to. Recently, the video trade magazine “Video Software Magazine” published a listing of the top 95 video chains. Not surprisingly, Blockbuster was number one. What was surprising was the size of their lead. Blockbuster is over FIVE times the size of the next largest chain. I didn’t total it up, but it appears that Blockbuster, at nearly 3000 stores, is bigger than all the other 94 chains combined. With a market that size, you find out what their rules are, and beg for a chance to play by them. If the only version of your movie has no rating, then you’ve excluded a HUGE portion of your market. Since all the studios want to play by Blockbuster’s rules, they’ll take their box art to BB for approval, and sometimes even go so far as to pay the MPAA to rate their movie even though they have no plans to ever release it in theatres. All so they can play by BB’s rules. An example of BB’s clout: About a month prior to this writing, L
