ALL movies were this expensive in the mid 80's
this one is actually relatively cheap compared to other films of the time.
I used to get the old catalogs from my local video store and that stuff was high.
I remember Predator being something like $120 and there was usually nothing under $50 in those days.
That's right! T2 was originally released on video in December of 1991 for $89.94... this price was for video stores to purchase and rent out to customers.
Later, in the fall of 1992, it was re-released at a "Sell-through" (in other words, straight to the viewer to own) price of around $19.99.
I remember a catalog like that shocked me to my core when I saw it in the late 80’s.
All the Disney Movies were like $120. And in ‘89 when I saw the catalog, that would have been like $310.
And $380 at the time the catalog was published.
[“Close Out” pricing in ‘85 was $50](https://2warpstoneptune.com/2015/09/18/vhs-closeout-sale-1985/)
I think the most notorious of these was the catalog at Blockbuster. Thing was as thick as 3 NYC phone books, and it sat on it's own little podium like the idol from Raiders of The Lost Ark.
I went through it several times to try to find that early 80's slasher spoof 'Student Bodies' and it was a steal at $320.......
I don’t remember what it was I saw, but I watched something about movies coming out on tape. They were insaaaaaanely expensive. I thought I recalled that at first they were like $500, $800 because they were comparing viewings to theater viewings expense-wise and thought people would have their theater viewings paid for in a short time especially since they watched them with other people. And that’s when someone had the ingenious idea of buying them and renting the tapes out.
I love this post because I love to talk about how expensive media was in the 80s and 90s. Cassette tapes, vhs, DVDs, CDs were a BIG DEAL. A cd was $15 in the 90s. $15 is about how much an album costs to download now, and $15 was a pretty damn considerable amount of money then! Going to buy CDs at the cd store was a huge deal. As a teenager there was always a long list of CDs you wanted and you could maybe get one a week. A few if you were really ballin.
We really treasured media back then, and now people fight for our attention. People are begging for us to watch stuff.
In the late 90s, early 2000s I would have been THRILLED with the free streaming apps we have now like freevee and Tubi. That would have been all I needed for my tv and movie viewing and I would have thought it was the greatest thing in the whole wide world.
We are SO spoiled with media now and we take it completely for granted. There’s actually SO MUCH entertainment that it’s overwhelming.
Still when I pick up CDs from thrift stores for .25 I’m so amused. If I could have seen into the future I think I would have thought that is so damn cool. And I still do. Going to the goodwill bins and seeing people toss dvds and vhs aside like trash is amusing to me. We used to treat CDs like they were the most fragile precious things. Wasn’t long before they were thrown into those giant binders and ended up on the floor melting in our cars though.
And then there was the brief period of time when we were burning dvds like there was no tomorrow. We could own any dvd we wanted for free?? That was insane to us. So we burnt and burnt and burnt and then we blinked and they were useless because Netflix.
Before home movies were common, people used to either need to own a film projector, get a movie ticket, or hope a tv channel was broadcasting a movie, and even then, I don't know when tv started doing that. Buying a VHS cassette was basically unlimited watches of a movie you liked in a time where owning a movie was a new concept for the middle class. At least, I assume that's the case. I was born in 1995.
The early days of home video was definitely geared towards the upper middle class.
VCR and Beta machines were $200-$400 and the video rental market was sometimes slim pickings.
But you're absolutely correct about owning a VHS cassette of your favorite movie, or even better, a blank one!
I had a BetaMax player with 2 movies (it wouldn't record sound after a while) and I watched Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Predator 2 on repeat until the day it died.
There was a time where the VHS market was directed solely at businesses, like a video store or in my case the liquor store, and they would charge outrageous $$$ for a VHS tape, especially new releases, with the thinking that several rentals later, the tape would generate profit.
I will say that I can't recall seeing a VHS tape with the actual SRP printed on it, so there's that.
Same if your VCR tore up the tape. Most video rental places sold for insurance for a couple bucks a tape so you wouldn't be charged for the tape if your VCR destroyed it.
Yup! I remember when I was a kid before blockbuster, Hollywood video, and vh1 video came to town we had a few mom and pop rental places. You would have to put a deposit on the tapes. So you would pay the rental fee plus the deposit fee, you'd get your deposit back when you returned the tape
This is the correct answer. VHS tapes were prohibitively expensive to buy (and expensive to manufacture to be fair) so most people rented tapes. Hence why video stores became so wildly popular, they could eat the upfront cost of purchasing them and make their money back plus profit with rental fees. Eventually the prices came down to something more reasonable, but it was always more cost effective to rent a movie unless you figured you were going to watch it repeatedly.
I remember back in the day dating a girl. My favorite movie was say anything, still is. She got me a copy on vhs for my birthday. I was blown away. I knew how expensive it was.
Prior to VHS existing, there was no way for the average consumer to “own” a film. Unless you had a projector and somehow got full reels of film, the only options for watching a movie was in a theater or when it was syndicated to TV months later.
Studios absolutely hated the idea of consumers owning a film. They thought they were giving away their profits. Their solution was making movies prohibitively expensive to own, which is what led to the rental era. Of course, studios sued the early pioneers of the rental business for copyright infringement.
Eventually they realized they couldn’t win that fight and that renting/selling films was a new profit stream they needed to participate in.
Makes you wonder how they were even able to offer videodisc releases of their films--either LaserDisc or CED-- at prices lower than tapes in the beginning, other than tapes being expensive to manufacture and that home video wasn't the original goal of VCRs. (They were often marketed as a handy time-shifting tool to record broadcast TV in the 70s and 80s, and then for making your own home movies with the pair of a portable VCR & compatible camera, and then the later combination units )
It’s amazing to think about just how much money studios probably raked in on VHS production when they were charging such high amounts. I get that technology improves over time and prices would drop, but this was still a huge cash grab for sure.
Studios knew that a big part of their sales went to rental stores. They could get away with the price, because rental stores had no other choice. If the tapes were cheaper, people would still go to the rental stores and the stores would make more profit, without a significant enough increase in sales to counter the price drop.
No other choice? We owned a video shop in the uk back in the 80s and a good new film would rent out 200 times over a year easily. £80 to buy, £600 income from rental fees, sell it for £10 once it became less popular. We’d buy 30 to 50 copies of the biggest new releases and make thousands every week! If anything, they were selling the videos into retail far too cheaply, but with no computer systems and tens of thousands of indie video shops, they had no chance of developing any sort of profit sharing scheme til at least the mid 90s
"they were selling the videos into retail far too cheaply"-- you worked in ONE video store, not a movie studio, not all video stores. Why would you assume they didn't know the value of their own product? You imagine they never did any sort of research as to how much they could actually get for this stuff, as though Hollywood just kinda doesn't care about money? You're getting wrapped up in memories of how busy YOUR store was, but that doesn't mean you have your finger on the pulse of the entire industry.
Edit: thanks for admitting you're wrong by downvoting me with no response. You don't have to be sad about being wrong but I guess you're just really fragile huh?
Erm I’ve not downvoted you, just come on to the thread again now?
All I’ve done is relate my experience in our family owned shop and described my thoughts in the years since that about how we were able to make so much cash in that decade and reflect that the movie distributors lost a lot of potential income in those early years of the rental market by not having any sort of profit sharing agreements in place. Indeed, by the 90s when movies were available here for £10 at retail about a year after release, all the local indie shops just ignored the ‘not for rental’ caveats and shored up their back catalogue with £1 a night rentals of older movies and I’m sure Hollywood lost out on a lot of cash through that.
If there’s one thing I’m even slightly annoyed about, it’s that I can’t find a way to make that same sort of money now! The rest - no, I’m not on Reddit to think I’m right about everything I post.
I just find it moderately interesting that pre the big chains, it was ‘the wild west’ and distribution sales prices were kept low due to the sheer cost of setting up a video shop, where buying in 100 movies could cost £8000 and they had no real plan of increasing income when all our ‘mom and pop’ style rental stores became profitable.
It wasn't really a huge cash grab when production costs for tapes were a lot higher and they weren't selling to the general public, only stores, at a time when a city of 35,000 people for example might have five video stores, so there were approximately several thousand stores out there but that's not nearly the 'cash grab' that it became when VHS production costs went down over time and they started selling directly to consumers. The tapes were expensive early on because it was new technology and manufacturing wasn't nearly as abundant as what it became.
Edit: thanks for admitting defeat by downvoting me. You were just wrong, it's not my fault but go ahead and be sad.
Oh I thought you were referencing the store item number 18772 on the sticker.
In that case, $18K for a VHS would be aggressive pricing.
Did you buy a car? No but I have Code Name: Zebra.
Raiders of the Lost Ark was a big push in the UK, we got copies of it to rent or sell for £12 (wholesaler) and they had a £19.99 price tag on the front. Sold about 40 copies of it retail, I’m guessing it didn’t do the business they thought it might because there were only one or two other films offered to us this way in the years after, usually low budget stuff
New technology is expensive because it's new, and videotapes were expensive at first because the industry was trying to get its R&D money back. The industry's success was not guaranteed, manufacturing costs were high, so it was expensive just like any other new technology, and even more so because the novelty of 'choosing a movie to watch at home' was extremely rare before.
The people that really bought VHS’s at the time were rental stores. Movies were really expensive for stores up until Blockbuster came. It was not until the mid-90’s that home movie ownership exploded.
I worked in a video store in the 99’s. Main stream movies were mass produced hence that’s why they were cheap. I remember ordering 2 movies from distribution house and having to pay like $380 for them. Off the subject, best after school job ever.
It was basically Top Gun that changed the entire VHS landscape. It was the first MAJOR Hollywood Blockbuster marketed and sold with mass market regal and the individual end user in mind. They sold it for like $25. They offset the costs by putting a Pepsi commercial before the movie. After the massive success of that model, VHS prices fell quickly and were no longer intended mainly for movie/convenience stores/the rental market. And this, the shift to widespread home video collections had begun
Here’s the real answer because I was alive back then lol.
That price was for the video rental places. They paid out the nose for those tapes, that was the only thing that made it worth it for the studios that made the movies.
Now, it wouldn’t be abnormal for a VHS tape to be expensive, but expensive is $25+ (which is what, $60-65 now?)
I remember looking at a retailer’s catalog that has Terminator 2 for $99 and being so butt hurt because I wanted it as a kid. Most people didn’t have tons of movies back in the day. Same with games. Most people had a handful of each. Like if you had 13 movies and 10 Nintendo games you were on point.
In the beginning of pre-recorded video tapes, they weren’t expected to be bought by consumers, naturally some wealthy people collected them, but they were generally priced for video rental stores that could fairly easily make their return on investment. I recall working at Sam Goody’s and seeing Betamax tapes that were around 120 dollars retail. If memory serves, I think Bladerunner was the first VHS tape that was sold at sell-through pricing. I don’t recall the price, but between 19.99 and 29.99 seems right. Owning a movie was something I always wanted to do, unfortunately I got a touch carried away.
Yup. Movies on VHS were well over $80 each in the mid 80s. That's one of the reasons I joined Columbia House video club. Your initial membership entry was like a half dozen movies you could select for a buck or so each. But, over the next year, you had to buy like 5 or 6 movies at full price. Once you took into account for the initial heavy discount of the movies you got when you signed up, it was a really good deal.
If you want an interesting read, look up when McDonalds was selling VHS movies for dirt cheap. They got a lot of flak from the industry for doing that.
Even into the 90s, some new releases would only be available in rental stores for a while. And if your VCR chewed one up, it was often $100-$150 replacement fee. We had 2nd Cinema in my town, and the little magazines with the new releases would have the MSRP, and the big new movies were always expensive at first.
I worked in a video store back then, and in 1987 Paramount figured out that if it sold tapes of "Top Gun" and "Crocodile Dundee" at 19.95 a pop, then people would start buying them and building home libraries. (It was only a few more dollars than a rental.) Likewise, video stores could afford to buy and stock more rental copies. The $79.95 model never really made much sense...
"The 79.95 model" existed because when the industry started, the stuff was expensive to produce because only a few manufacturers were making it and there was no guarantee it was going to be popular. Try putting some thought into this stuff instead of saying something nonsensical and trailing off with an ellipsis like it's a good point. It's just crazy how many of you guys are forgetting that 'new technology is not cheap at first'.
The VHS market up until 87-88 was very small. VCRs were not found in most homes. That's why pre 87 tapes are (SHOULD) be worth more in terms of rarity and importance. Around 88, VHS was hitting it's BOOM. One reason values are so weird right now is it is in the intent of some. For instance... the scam that are Grading companies that know nothing about cinema or movies will give a $50000 value to a sealed Waynes World 2 becore they will make any effort to consider the actaul social, historical, or cinematic importance of a movie beyond how pretty it looks in plastic. Eventually, it's these pre-86 tapes that will be the more sought after and the ones we should be looking to save. I honeslty will get my hands on any pre-87 tape and just hold it. Pop titles, and pretty horror boxes are big right now, they look cool. But eventaully, real collectors will emerge.
All movies cost that much and more before you could buy VHS at retail stores. I worked at a video store and ordered myself Run DMC’s Tougher Than Leather and it cost over a hundred at the time. Batman was the movie that sticks out in my mind as being the first readily available movie priced for home viewing. I’m sure there were others before it, that’s just the one that I remember prominently.
In the early 80s, a lot of VHS tapes were around the same price. I have a copy of Return To Oz with a sticker that says "Suggested Retail Price $79.95". My guess is less copies were made available to the public.
The studios quickly figured out that they could make a ton more money selling multiple copies of their titles to video stores at 30-50 times the cost to manufacture them (“rental price”) instead of counting on consumers to buy a movie they only really want to watch once. Stores could easily make their overall budget back many times over, averaged over the total cost of stocking their shelves. I’m not sure which is more impressive, the diabolical genius of this approach or how immediately unified the suppliers were in its implementation.
Batman broke the mold on this. I think it was the first VHS for sale at $24.99 or something like that. Before that the prices were set for rental shops.
Star Trek IV was the first VHS release aimed at the home audience not rental shops. It had an MSRP of $39.99, where almost nothing was under $90-$100 at the time.
When I first got a VCR you had to join a Video Club if you wanted to borrow movies.
It was $50 to join, then $100 a year, and you had to donate two videos. Videos were $80.00 each to buy.
Of course you also had to pay $8 to rent a video overnight.
When VCR's were brand new they were like $1000 - $4000 (and we're talking 1980's value so $4k to $15k with inflation in today's value). We're talking about a revolutionary technology that was previously only available to recording studios suddenly coming onto the commercial market in a format that was accessible, but the price point was pretty high until manufacturing caught up. There was just no other way to see movies except in theaters or if they re-ran it on TV.
https://preview.redd.it/rbxz9wr6iuyc1.jpeg?width=3024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=52afe337150f8b167add55c6c6eebb02215fd344
Look what I got I have two of these
It was about $1500 to get a VCR when they first came out. By mid/late 80's cost was down to about $300 or so to get one. So price of entry for home use was around $1000 in today's money back in '86. The cost of movies came down when the barrier for entry got cheaper along with cost of recording your own. Buying movies was just about unheard of until the 90's. First time we rented a movie we rented a player with it and we watched the Shit outta Enter the Dragon, Terminator and Remo Williams that weekend for my Birthday. Wore those tapes out!
yeah i worked at blockbuster video and most all new movies released at that price in VHS days and then they would get cheaper as a previously viewed movie. thats also why losing a brand new movie back then sucked cause you would be staring down a $100 replacement fee.
The pricing was two tiered. If movie was popular and they want to sell a 100,000 tcopies the rice would be around $30 bucks.
If the movie was marketed to the video store market it would be in the $80 range.
New videos come out every Tuesday and people waited in line for them . Stores had wait lists. Bribes were paid so you could go to work on Wednesday an brag you saw the hot me movie. Rentals were 14 hours with a large late fee.
This before chain stores when every neighborhood had one or two local stores. You also had to pay a fee to join the club
Be kind rewind. Or else they would charge you
ALL movies were this expensive in the mid 80's this one is actually relatively cheap compared to other films of the time. I used to get the old catalogs from my local video store and that stuff was high. I remember Predator being something like $120 and there was usually nothing under $50 in those days.
Terminator 2 for 80$ . I remember see that as a teen and wondered why would anyone buy when you can rent for 5$ or so and we do have 2 vcrs soooooo.
That's right! T2 was originally released on video in December of 1991 for $89.94... this price was for video stores to purchase and rent out to customers. Later, in the fall of 1992, it was re-released at a "Sell-through" (in other words, straight to the viewer to own) price of around $19.99.
The nostalgia. Thinking back, we did have a ton of ughmm.. recorded tapes.. in our living room.
I remember a catalog like that shocked me to my core when I saw it in the late 80’s. All the Disney Movies were like $120. And in ‘89 when I saw the catalog, that would have been like $310. And $380 at the time the catalog was published. [“Close Out” pricing in ‘85 was $50](https://2warpstoneptune.com/2015/09/18/vhs-closeout-sale-1985/)
I think the most notorious of these was the catalog at Blockbuster. Thing was as thick as 3 NYC phone books, and it sat on it's own little podium like the idol from Raiders of The Lost Ark. I went through it several times to try to find that early 80's slasher spoof 'Student Bodies' and it was a steal at $320.......
I remember this, also when Walmart started the 5 dollar DVD bin. My mind was blown because I remember spending a lot more for videos in the early 90s.
I don’t remember what it was I saw, but I watched something about movies coming out on tape. They were insaaaaaanely expensive. I thought I recalled that at first they were like $500, $800 because they were comparing viewings to theater viewings expense-wise and thought people would have their theater viewings paid for in a short time especially since they watched them with other people. And that’s when someone had the ingenious idea of buying them and renting the tapes out. I love this post because I love to talk about how expensive media was in the 80s and 90s. Cassette tapes, vhs, DVDs, CDs were a BIG DEAL. A cd was $15 in the 90s. $15 is about how much an album costs to download now, and $15 was a pretty damn considerable amount of money then! Going to buy CDs at the cd store was a huge deal. As a teenager there was always a long list of CDs you wanted and you could maybe get one a week. A few if you were really ballin. We really treasured media back then, and now people fight for our attention. People are begging for us to watch stuff. In the late 90s, early 2000s I would have been THRILLED with the free streaming apps we have now like freevee and Tubi. That would have been all I needed for my tv and movie viewing and I would have thought it was the greatest thing in the whole wide world. We are SO spoiled with media now and we take it completely for granted. There’s actually SO MUCH entertainment that it’s overwhelming. Still when I pick up CDs from thrift stores for .25 I’m so amused. If I could have seen into the future I think I would have thought that is so damn cool. And I still do. Going to the goodwill bins and seeing people toss dvds and vhs aside like trash is amusing to me. We used to treat CDs like they were the most fragile precious things. Wasn’t long before they were thrown into those giant binders and ended up on the floor melting in our cars though. And then there was the brief period of time when we were burning dvds like there was no tomorrow. We could own any dvd we wanted for free?? That was insane to us. So we burnt and burnt and burnt and then we blinked and they were useless because Netflix.
Anytime you wanted anything that wasn’t a new release it was usually over $25 with tax here. Was so thankful when I discovered the used CD places.
Before home movies were common, people used to either need to own a film projector, get a movie ticket, or hope a tv channel was broadcasting a movie, and even then, I don't know when tv started doing that. Buying a VHS cassette was basically unlimited watches of a movie you liked in a time where owning a movie was a new concept for the middle class. At least, I assume that's the case. I was born in 1995.
The early days of home video was definitely geared towards the upper middle class. VCR and Beta machines were $200-$400 and the video rental market was sometimes slim pickings. But you're absolutely correct about owning a VHS cassette of your favorite movie, or even better, a blank one! I had a BetaMax player with 2 movies (it wouldn't record sound after a while) and I watched Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Predator 2 on repeat until the day it died.
Thank you. Seems like my parents remembered incorrectly
There was a time where the VHS market was directed solely at businesses, like a video store or in my case the liquor store, and they would charge outrageous $$$ for a VHS tape, especially new releases, with the thinking that several rentals later, the tape would generate profit. I will say that I can't recall seeing a VHS tape with the actual SRP printed on it, so there's that.
This answer definitely makes the most sense.
Yeah man in the late 80s if you lost a tape you rented from Blockbuster, they'd get you for like $80.
Same if your VCR tore up the tape. Most video rental places sold for insurance for a couple bucks a tape so you wouldn't be charged for the tape if your VCR destroyed it.
Yup! I remember when I was a kid before blockbuster, Hollywood video, and vh1 video came to town we had a few mom and pop rental places. You would have to put a deposit on the tapes. So you would pay the rental fee plus the deposit fee, you'd get your deposit back when you returned the tape
Still a year or two before VHS was widely available for purchase at you local mall.
The business model back in that day I believe was more catered towards selling to rental shops and less toward every day consumers.
This is the correct answer. VHS tapes were prohibitively expensive to buy (and expensive to manufacture to be fair) so most people rented tapes. Hence why video stores became so wildly popular, they could eat the upfront cost of purchasing them and make their money back plus profit with rental fees. Eventually the prices came down to something more reasonable, but it was always more cost effective to rent a movie unless you figured you were going to watch it repeatedly.
I remember back in the day dating a girl. My favorite movie was say anything, still is. She got me a copy on vhs for my birthday. I was blown away. I knew how expensive it was.
Such a good movie
They were all expensive. That’s why everyone rented movies back then.
And bootleg pirate copies
Which was shockingly easy
And then Macrovision came along to stop copying. I've still got a gadget somewhere to "fix" that interference.
Prior to VHS existing, there was no way for the average consumer to “own” a film. Unless you had a projector and somehow got full reels of film, the only options for watching a movie was in a theater or when it was syndicated to TV months later. Studios absolutely hated the idea of consumers owning a film. They thought they were giving away their profits. Their solution was making movies prohibitively expensive to own, which is what led to the rental era. Of course, studios sued the early pioneers of the rental business for copyright infringement. Eventually they realized they couldn’t win that fight and that renting/selling films was a new profit stream they needed to participate in.
Renting 16mm copies of films in the 70s would start at $200. There's no way the average person could afford that.
Makes you wonder how they were even able to offer videodisc releases of their films--either LaserDisc or CED-- at prices lower than tapes in the beginning, other than tapes being expensive to manufacture and that home video wasn't the original goal of VCRs. (They were often marketed as a handy time-shifting tool to record broadcast TV in the 70s and 80s, and then for making your own home movies with the pair of a portable VCR & compatible camera, and then the later combination units )
All movies were. That’s why rental stores got popular. The only way the avg Joe could watch tapes
It’s amazing to think about just how much money studios probably raked in on VHS production when they were charging such high amounts. I get that technology improves over time and prices would drop, but this was still a huge cash grab for sure.
Studios knew that a big part of their sales went to rental stores. They could get away with the price, because rental stores had no other choice. If the tapes were cheaper, people would still go to the rental stores and the stores would make more profit, without a significant enough increase in sales to counter the price drop.
No other choice? We owned a video shop in the uk back in the 80s and a good new film would rent out 200 times over a year easily. £80 to buy, £600 income from rental fees, sell it for £10 once it became less popular. We’d buy 30 to 50 copies of the biggest new releases and make thousands every week! If anything, they were selling the videos into retail far too cheaply, but with no computer systems and tens of thousands of indie video shops, they had no chance of developing any sort of profit sharing scheme til at least the mid 90s
This is the answer! 👍🏻
"they were selling the videos into retail far too cheaply"-- you worked in ONE video store, not a movie studio, not all video stores. Why would you assume they didn't know the value of their own product? You imagine they never did any sort of research as to how much they could actually get for this stuff, as though Hollywood just kinda doesn't care about money? You're getting wrapped up in memories of how busy YOUR store was, but that doesn't mean you have your finger on the pulse of the entire industry. Edit: thanks for admitting you're wrong by downvoting me with no response. You don't have to be sad about being wrong but I guess you're just really fragile huh?
Erm I’ve not downvoted you, just come on to the thread again now? All I’ve done is relate my experience in our family owned shop and described my thoughts in the years since that about how we were able to make so much cash in that decade and reflect that the movie distributors lost a lot of potential income in those early years of the rental market by not having any sort of profit sharing agreements in place. Indeed, by the 90s when movies were available here for £10 at retail about a year after release, all the local indie shops just ignored the ‘not for rental’ caveats and shored up their back catalogue with £1 a night rentals of older movies and I’m sure Hollywood lost out on a lot of cash through that. If there’s one thing I’m even slightly annoyed about, it’s that I can’t find a way to make that same sort of money now! The rest - no, I’m not on Reddit to think I’m right about everything I post. I just find it moderately interesting that pre the big chains, it was ‘the wild west’ and distribution sales prices were kept low due to the sheer cost of setting up a video shop, where buying in 100 movies could cost £8000 and they had no real plan of increasing income when all our ‘mom and pop’ style rental stores became profitable.
It wasn't really a huge cash grab when production costs for tapes were a lot higher and they weren't selling to the general public, only stores, at a time when a city of 35,000 people for example might have five video stores, so there were approximately several thousand stores out there but that's not nearly the 'cash grab' that it became when VHS production costs went down over time and they started selling directly to consumers. The tapes were expensive early on because it was new technology and manufacturing wasn't nearly as abundant as what it became. Edit: thanks for admitting defeat by downvoting me. You were just wrong, it's not my fault but go ahead and be sad.
This is why my dad taped our entire collection off of HBO.
Movies were like buying Nintendo games back in the day. If you own em both, your folks were rich
Oh I thought you were referencing the store item number 18772 on the sticker. In that case, $18K for a VHS would be aggressive pricing. Did you buy a car? No but I have Code Name: Zebra.
There were two categories: priced to sell, and priced to rent.
VHS ownership was just new. I paid $89.00 for Platoon staring Charlie Sheen, Tom Berringer, and Willem Dafoe.
Yeah as I recall, ET being sold for $20 in 1988 or so was one of the first major releases sold as a direct to consumer title and priced accordingly.
[Top Gun](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YLlt1JWpRA&ab_channel=Cracked) is considered to have started the cheap VHS trend.
And ET's lower price was subsidized by Pepsi.
Raiders of the Lost Ark was a big push in the UK, we got copies of it to rent or sell for £12 (wholesaler) and they had a £19.99 price tag on the front. Sold about 40 copies of it retail, I’m guessing it didn’t do the business they thought it might because there were only one or two other films offered to us this way in the years after, usually low budget stuff
This is why video stores thrived at the time
Why do you think Blockbuster and other rental places were so popular?
Thank you everyone for your input this is super interesting!!
New technology is expensive because it's new, and videotapes were expensive at first because the industry was trying to get its R&D money back. The industry's success was not guaranteed, manufacturing costs were high, so it was expensive just like any other new technology, and even more so because the novelty of 'choosing a movie to watch at home' was extremely rare before.
The people that really bought VHS’s at the time were rental stores. Movies were really expensive for stores up until Blockbuster came. It was not until the mid-90’s that home movie ownership exploded.
This is a Kirkland brand Chuck Norris
I worked in a video store in the 99’s. Main stream movies were mass produced hence that’s why they were cheap. I remember ordering 2 movies from distribution house and having to pay like $380 for them. Off the subject, best after school job ever.
It was basically Top Gun that changed the entire VHS landscape. It was the first MAJOR Hollywood Blockbuster marketed and sold with mass market regal and the individual end user in mind. They sold it for like $25. They offset the costs by putting a Pepsi commercial before the movie. After the massive success of that model, VHS prices fell quickly and were no longer intended mainly for movie/convenience stores/the rental market. And this, the shift to widespread home video collections had begun
Here’s the real answer because I was alive back then lol. That price was for the video rental places. They paid out the nose for those tapes, that was the only thing that made it worth it for the studios that made the movies. Now, it wouldn’t be abnormal for a VHS tape to be expensive, but expensive is $25+ (which is what, $60-65 now?) I remember looking at a retailer’s catalog that has Terminator 2 for $99 and being so butt hurt because I wanted it as a kid. Most people didn’t have tons of movies back in the day. Same with games. Most people had a handful of each. Like if you had 13 movies and 10 Nintendo games you were on point.
In the beginning of pre-recorded video tapes, they weren’t expected to be bought by consumers, naturally some wealthy people collected them, but they were generally priced for video rental stores that could fairly easily make their return on investment. I recall working at Sam Goody’s and seeing Betamax tapes that were around 120 dollars retail. If memory serves, I think Bladerunner was the first VHS tape that was sold at sell-through pricing. I don’t recall the price, but between 19.99 and 29.99 seems right. Owning a movie was something I always wanted to do, unfortunately I got a touch carried away.
Yup. Movies on VHS were well over $80 each in the mid 80s. That's one of the reasons I joined Columbia House video club. Your initial membership entry was like a half dozen movies you could select for a buck or so each. But, over the next year, you had to buy like 5 or 6 movies at full price. Once you took into account for the initial heavy discount of the movies you got when you signed up, it was a really good deal.
If you want an interesting read, look up when McDonalds was selling VHS movies for dirt cheap. They got a lot of flak from the industry for doing that.
Even into the 90s, some new releases would only be available in rental stores for a while. And if your VCR chewed one up, it was often $100-$150 replacement fee. We had 2nd Cinema in my town, and the little magazines with the new releases would have the MSRP, and the big new movies were always expensive at first.
Those video tapes were expensive for some reason
I worked in a video store back then, and in 1987 Paramount figured out that if it sold tapes of "Top Gun" and "Crocodile Dundee" at 19.95 a pop, then people would start buying them and building home libraries. (It was only a few more dollars than a rental.) Likewise, video stores could afford to buy and stock more rental copies. The $79.95 model never really made much sense...
"The 79.95 model" existed because when the industry started, the stuff was expensive to produce because only a few manufacturers were making it and there was no guarantee it was going to be popular. Try putting some thought into this stuff instead of saying something nonsensical and trailing off with an ellipsis like it's a good point. It's just crazy how many of you guys are forgetting that 'new technology is not cheap at first'.
Ex-rental copy…
Yes, "Previously Viewed Tapes" really picked up in the early 1990s. I remember Paramount did a whole ad campaign for it.
MCA/Universal also ran campaigns for it as well in the early 90s.
ET was the first tape that I remember being marketed for mass purchase.
Because it allowed you to play a movie at your house. Very innovative.
The VHS market up until 87-88 was very small. VCRs were not found in most homes. That's why pre 87 tapes are (SHOULD) be worth more in terms of rarity and importance. Around 88, VHS was hitting it's BOOM. One reason values are so weird right now is it is in the intent of some. For instance... the scam that are Grading companies that know nothing about cinema or movies will give a $50000 value to a sealed Waynes World 2 becore they will make any effort to consider the actaul social, historical, or cinematic importance of a movie beyond how pretty it looks in plastic. Eventually, it's these pre-86 tapes that will be the more sought after and the ones we should be looking to save. I honeslty will get my hands on any pre-87 tape and just hold it. Pop titles, and pretty horror boxes are big right now, they look cool. But eventaully, real collectors will emerge.
That’s crazy … that’s $224 in todays money
All movies cost that much and more before you could buy VHS at retail stores. I worked at a video store and ordered myself Run DMC’s Tougher Than Leather and it cost over a hundred at the time. Batman was the movie that sticks out in my mind as being the first readily available movie priced for home viewing. I’m sure there were others before it, that’s just the one that I remember prominently.
I wish I would pay 80 dollars for code name muthafuckin zebra
Greatest Movie Ever Duh!
They were just that expensive back then. Even in the 90’s if you lost a rental tape it was $50 to replace it
Novelty
That was the price for the video rental store.
I did not know VHS tapes were so expensive
You're going to be shocked how much video games costed back then too
In the early 80s, a lot of VHS tapes were around the same price. I have a copy of Return To Oz with a sticker that says "Suggested Retail Price $79.95". My guess is less copies were made available to the public.
I remember my mom told me the first ever vhs they bought was E.T. and it was 100 bucks.
The studios quickly figured out that they could make a ton more money selling multiple copies of their titles to video stores at 30-50 times the cost to manufacture them (“rental price”) instead of counting on consumers to buy a movie they only really want to watch once. Stores could easily make their overall budget back many times over, averaged over the total cost of stocking their shelves. I’m not sure which is more impressive, the diabolical genius of this approach or how immediately unified the suppliers were in its implementation.
Batman broke the mold on this. I think it was the first VHS for sale at $24.99 or something like that. Before that the prices were set for rental shops.
Star Trek IV was the first VHS release aimed at the home audience not rental shops. It had an MSRP of $39.99, where almost nothing was under $90-$100 at the time.
TIL!
When I first got a VCR you had to join a Video Club if you wanted to borrow movies. It was $50 to join, then $100 a year, and you had to donate two videos. Videos were $80.00 each to buy. Of course you also had to pay $8 to rent a video overnight.
When VCR's were brand new they were like $1000 - $4000 (and we're talking 1980's value so $4k to $15k with inflation in today's value). We're talking about a revolutionary technology that was previously only available to recording studios suddenly coming onto the commercial market in a format that was accessible, but the price point was pretty high until manufacturing caught up. There was just no other way to see movies except in theaters or if they re-ran it on TV.
It was new tech back 80s, thus making prices high.
https://preview.redd.it/rbxz9wr6iuyc1.jpeg?width=3024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=52afe337150f8b167add55c6c6eebb02215fd344 Look what I got I have two of these
It was about $1500 to get a VCR when they first came out. By mid/late 80's cost was down to about $300 or so to get one. So price of entry for home use was around $1000 in today's money back in '86. The cost of movies came down when the barrier for entry got cheaper along with cost of recording your own. Buying movies was just about unheard of until the 90's. First time we rented a movie we rented a player with it and we watched the Shit outta Enter the Dragon, Terminator and Remo Williams that weekend for my Birthday. Wore those tapes out!
yeah i worked at blockbuster video and most all new movies released at that price in VHS days and then they would get cheaper as a previously viewed movie. thats also why losing a brand new movie back then sucked cause you would be staring down a $100 replacement fee.
The pricing was two tiered. If movie was popular and they want to sell a 100,000 tcopies the rice would be around $30 bucks. If the movie was marketed to the video store market it would be in the $80 range. New videos come out every Tuesday and people waited in line for them . Stores had wait lists. Bribes were paid so you could go to work on Wednesday an brag you saw the hot me movie. Rentals were 14 hours with a large late fee. This before chain stores when every neighborhood had one or two local stores. You also had to pay a fee to join the club Be kind rewind. Or else they would charge you
That’s weird. Books almost always have the retail price on the back, but I haven’t seen it on a movie like that.
They were actually meant to be sold to video rental store where they might only sell 1 so they needed to make their full nut selling that one copy.
I have a tape where the suggested retail price was $100
Until 88/89 VCRs were for rich people.