I think I'll use today's entry to enlighten you all on the problem of unreleased films. Basically, these are the films that never make it to a final retail version, ending their life in dusty film cans lying in the archives of old movie theatres. When my mother asked me to find some of her old favourites for her on the Internet, I, naive as ever, tried a quick search on eBay. No results. Now, as all regular visitors of the auction site know, receiving a blank page with no more options is a freak occurrence, so I pondered a bit about it. I then tried some other sites, and some more, until I finally reached the conclusion that the films had never been commercially released aside from their theatrical debut, even though they had all received high marks on IMDB.

After the initial confusion, I realised that this was actually relatively normal for older films, and even though there might be a market for distributing them, many films are allowed to die quiet deaths. Searching IMDB I found a horde of unreleased films from the birth of the business, several of them having received high rankings. Many were also from prominent directors such as Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa and Billy Wilder, which makes it increasingly weird that their early projects were never released as a set.

And what would the solution to this horrible dilemma be? I honestly don’t know. The final decision lies with greedy executives for gigantic companies, so the hope that they'll invest money in unsafe projects seems very far-fetched. However, I picked up an idea about a year ago, someone talking about releasing several classic movies on a single disc, with decreased quality. Especially with Blu-Ray and HD DVD starting to dominate the scene, it will be possible to store 8-10 films in quality similar to that of a DVD on just a single disc. While this method of releasing titles might not satisfy diehard fans, it will certainly serve as a good indicator as to which titles might sell well as full-fledged releases. And it would be more than enough for us casual movie fans interested in seeing where it all began.