Oscars Pack the Pressure onto Online DVD Rental

LAST weekend saw the annual Oscars award ceremony announce the best achievements in film across the last year.

Online DVD rental demand has soared over the past week as millions clamour to get hold of the titles that caught the judges' attention: Lovefilm saw demand for multi-award winner The Hurt Locker jump by 117% in 24 hours.

Whether online DVD rental sites will be able to deal with this sudden upsurge remains in question, however, and it's likely that many customers will suffer some delay before they can enjoy the new award winners.

And the awards go to...

Director Kathryn Bigelow's Iraq war set thriller The Hurt Locker was unquestionably Oscar top dog, taking home six awards including Best Picture.

Avatar, Crazy Heart and Precious all took home more than one award.

Demand is also expected to increase for some of the nominated titles, particularly the British films An Education whose screenplay was written by highly proclaimed author Nick Hornby and political drama In the Loop based on the BBC TV series The Thick of It.

Keeping up with the Oscars

DVD rental companies were quick to tell us that they'll have no trouble meeting demand for the Oscar-winning titles: Blockbuster said that they were, "...confident that we'll have enough copies of all the award winning titles - past, present and future, to cope with demand." and Lovefilm were similarly confident.

However, with such a rapid increase there are bound to be some titles left languishing on rental queues.

Helen Cowley, the Editor of Lovefilm predicted that this was just the beginning of The Hurt Locker's popularity and that "the DVD will dominate the rental charts for months to come."

The Young Victoria also saw a 37% rise in rental requests immediately after the ceremony and Up was the third most popular with a 19% increase.

A similar surge was seen following the BAFTA awards, where demand climbed phenomenally in the 24 hours after the winners were announced.

However, some of the Oscar winning titles have not even been released on DVD yet, so rental companies may meet with an even larger problem as the pre-orders reach unmanageable levels.

Lovefilm pre-orders for The Blind Side are up by 252% and Crazy Heart is not far behind with its 212% increase.

On the other hand, the Oscars was an unexpected coup for Blockbuster which is currently the only place online that subscribers can see Christopher Waltz's spine-tingling performance as 'the Jew Hunter' in Inglourious Basterds, a performance which secured him the best supporting actor award.

While You're Waiting...

Caught in the long online queues for the new award-winning titles? Why not browse for some other award winners instead?

The 'Razzies' or Golden Raspberry Awards were also out recently, awarding the 2009 films that were so bad they were... nope, still really bad.

We're sure there won't be too many other people waiting to take home Worst Picture Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.

Comments