Our take...
Fox's move follows that of Summit Entertainment and Paramount Home Entertainment who both recently used a similar approach for a number of smaller titles, including The Brothers Bloom and Dance Flick respectively. Although the First Sale Doctrine means that studios cannot prevent the resale of such discs, charging a slightly higher wholesale price - likely to be $4-$5 more than the standard retail trade price - and supplying only wholesalers will makes the discs less accessible to mass-merchants than to rental stores. This approach, which harks back to the days when the high volume of 'rental titles' released each month were the real driver of the video sector, will only really work for smaller titles, as the demand for blockbuster titles may override higher trade prices. At a time when US consumers are seen to be returning to rental and reducing retail spending it comes as no surprise that studios are increasingly experimenting with release and pricing strategies in order to increase their shares of rental spending.