Disney Movie Club to Close Permanently
Sony will produce Disney's physical media releases going forward.
The Disney Movie Club, which was founded in 2001 to sell VHS and DVD movies direct to consumers, will soon close down permanently. The service, which offers attractive teasers like "five movies for a dollar" in order to convince fans to join a subscription service for access to exclusive discs, will end its run as part of Sony's just-announced takeover of Disney's physical media production. Fans will have three months -- until May 20, 2024 -- to make their final purchases before the club closes down. The company started to quietly inform users who logged into their DMC clubs last night, but no official announcement hit until today.
Sony will take over production of Disney's DVD and Blu-ray media beginning later this year. According to Bill Hunt at The Digital Bits, Sony will do everything from the actual authoring of the discs to the physical distribution of media. While Disney and Sony have not yet made an official announcement to confirm the news, fans started to notice late last night that when they logged into the Disney Movie Club, they would get a pop-up notice informing them about the club's imminent closure.
At present, the Disney Movie Club website is unable to process transactions, presumably as a result of current users rushing to the site before potential stock issues start to pile up.
Hunt's report doesn't have details as to what movies specifically Sony will be distributing. Given Disney's long history of keeping some of its content in "the vault," it would not be surprising to see most of their catalog titles -- many of which are only available on Disney Movie Club even now -- phased out of the physical media space.
Disney has been an outlier in the physical media space in the last few years. While sales are down, the average price you can expect to spend on discs is up. That includes plenty of boutique Blu-ray labels, lots of special editions of fan-favorites, and deep cuts that simply would not be affordable if they had to be sold for $12 at Walmart. While some studios have been digging into their libraries to find movies they can restore for that higher price point, Disney has been sitting on years of movies not only from their old labels like Touchstone, but also from the recently-acquired 20th Century Fox.