Originally posted by: Samrogers
I was wondering if any of you know how much it costs Lucasfilm to produce each of their DVDs of their '04 special editions? I heard that they make a huge profit on each DVD that they sell. I bet Lucas outsources most, if not, all of the manufacturing of his merchandising and the things he sells only cost him pennies on the dollar of profit he makes off the stuff.

Sorry if this is in the wrong thread. I'm not sure if this should go here or in the General SW thread. I have come here often and decided to join because I don’t believe a question like this has ever been asked.

Of course everything is outsourced. No studio has their own disc pressing factory or t-shirt print shop on site. Like any other studio, Lucasfilm (or perhaps 20th Century Fox) pays some other company to print the discs, package, and deliver them to stores. You could have left Lucasfilm out of your question entirely and asked, "How much does it cost to make a DVD? I heard that studios make a huge profit on each DVD they sell." And it's true that they do, because it costs maybe a couple bucks at most to press a disc, print the artwork, and package it in a case. It doesn't cost Lucasfilm any more or less than any other studio to make DVDs.

Of course, producing a DVD requires a certain amount of pre-mastering and design before it can be sent off for printing. You have to pay someone (like Lowry Digital) to transfer and clean up your prints, someone else to master the audio and video, someone else (like Van Ling) to create the DVD menus, and someone else to compile all the materials and author and encode the disc. Who knows how many hundreds of thousands of dollars they paid for all that, but the pre-mastering work on the 2004 DVDs was outstanding. Unfortunately it was a handful of "deliberate creative decisions" that were the problem.

But of course sales of the DVDs in 2004 set records and millions were sold around the world.

Now think about the most recent release of the GOUT. Basically all they did was take the LD master tapes and combine them with some super-cheesy menus that were probably whipped up by some bargain-basement design studio in a day or two, and presto: a super-cheap authored DVD master to combine with the existing SE DVDS.

But now that that's already been done and they have masters ready to go, every time they re-release the DVDs, all they're paying is the cost to manufacture the discs and packaging. Are they making a huge profit off of them? Based on how much it costs to produce them, of course they are.

And guess what? Even though they've been re-released every year for the last three years, people are still buying them.