Last month we reported that something strange was going on with Disney and Amazon.com. None of Disney’s recent Blu-ray’s titles were available for preorder at Amazon.com, but all of those titles were listed at sites such as Target.com, Wal-Mart.com and BestBuy.com. If you wanted to purchase Blu-rays for Doctor Strange, Moana or Rogue One from Amazon, you would either receive a message that the title was unavailable for preorder, or on the day of the title’s release, there would be a message stating that the title is temporarily out of stock and the estimated shipping date was 2-3 months.
There still is no official word from either Disney or Amazon as to what has been going on, but our sources are telling us that Amazon is the culprit. Apparently Amazon wants a bigger slice of the revenue from the sale of Disney’s Blu-rays. Meanwhile other sites are content with the deal that they have with Disney. Disney is not budging knowing that they can just sell their Blu-rays at other retailers and that could be why we are seeing more exclusive editions of current Disney blockbusters on Blu-ray. Disney doesn’t have much to lose by holding out. It’s not like people that want the Blu-rays are going to chose not to get the movies. Consumers do have options with other retailers and they can also just go the Digital HD route if they chose. So Disney is not going to lose money by having Amazon not carry their product. And unfortunately, Amazon is not going to go out of business anytime soon by not making preorders available on their site for Disney Blu-rays.
The people that seem to be losing are the consumers, and I would say more specifically Amazon Prime members who are Disney fans. An Amazon Prime member is paying and annual fee of $99 for this service. Granted, it provides you with a ton of benefits like free 2 day shipping or better, free release date shipping, a video streaming service, music streaming, photo storage, 20% off video game preorders and so on, But currently if you want Amazon to ship you a Disney Blu-ray on the day it is released, it aint going to happen. You can purchase the movie digitally and also on DVD through Amazon, just not on Blu-ray.
Here is an update on the status of current Disney Blu-ray titles that have been affected:
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story – Temporarily out of stock.
Moana – Temporarily out of stock.
Doctor Strange – Temporarily out of stock. But Amazon has it on sale this week for $17.99! LOL
There is no problem with purchasing older titles, like Zootopia or Finding Dory, through Amazon. These titles, and many other Disney titles, are in stock at Amazon. This problem has to do with preorders and sales of fairly newer Disney titles and it appears to have started with the releases of the Doctor Strange Blu-ray back in February.
Hopefully both sides will come to agreement, but as for now it appears that both Disney and Amazon feel they really dont need each other for the immediate future. We will keep you posted.
