‘Mulan’ Will Release On Blu-Ray and DVD This Week
By George Robbins
This year has been a rough one by many different standards at this point and things aren’t exactly bound to get any better with this ongoing pandemic. The movie industry specifically has had a lot going wrong with it, especially over the past few months and things aren’t necessarily getting any better as time passes. The problem with the way things are working out in the movie industry at the moment is highly proportioned to the fact that theaters are all but shut down at this point. Movie theaters haven’t been able to consistently bring in customers since they had their official re-openings. As a result of this, they have lost a lot of business over the course of the past few months and it has even resulted in the AMC theater company possibly going bankrupt by the end of this year.
So if theaters are truly doing this terribly with everything going on in the world, how is it that studios in the industry are managing to cope with all of this. They are either delaying the releases of most of their films or they are taking the alternative approach which would be a direct-to-digital approach to release. With the latter approach, there is a lot going on that needs to be accounted for and a lot that needs to be recognized by the studio doing it. The big takeaway is that whatever studio decides to go with a digital approach right away will inevitably lose out on the chance to have a theatrical release later on. This is precisely the reason why they will only really be taking this approach with movie that they feel will be better for an at-home experience as opposed to a theatrical one.
Disney recently decided that this would be the proper release method for their live-action version of ‘Mulan‘ instead of waiting for a theatrical release. This was because the movie was first meant to release back in March, but when the pandemic hit, it was pushed back until theaters would be able to reopen their doors to the public. Therefore, the film was given a release date of around the end of July and finally a release date near the end of August. As they got closer to that theatrical release date, they finally made the decision to just release the film for a premium on their Disney+ service rather than await a proper release window. In the end, despite a lot of controversy that ended up surrounding the film, the movie brought in a lot of new subscriptions and a large spike in viewership on the service.
The movie has now been out a couple of months on Disney+ for the premium price of $30 and won’t become a free part of the service until later this year. Even though it hasn’t been long since its initial release, it doesn’t seem like it matters all that much with theaters essentially out of business at the moment. Without theatrical exclusivity, it would appear that the timeline of events surrounding movies can go faster and faster than it ever has before. Therefore it would seem that they can now release movies on Blu-ray and DVD far sooner than they would if the movie had a theatrical release. So as of November 10th, the movie will actually be available for purchase in that method of purchase for anyone who wants to own it physically.