The shop received a pair of customer requests from the UK today: Akira Kurosawa’s “Ran” and Brian De Palma’s “Body Double” from new British boutique label Indicator.
Even since Indicator’s “Body Double” showed up on the “Coming Soon” section it’s been generating curiosity, both about that release itself and the label that put it out. The first question, typically, is whether more copies of “Body Double” (or any of the other titles Indicator revealed as part of their initial slate of releases) are on the way. What I’ve told people is that, no, there aren’t any more Indicator titles currently in transit, however the shop is open to taking requests for them. However, there are no plans at this time to order a reference copy and add any Indicator titles to the shop’s inventory.
This might seem perplexing to some, given that Indicator is an exciting new company and their releases are generating a lot of buzz. Here’s the thing, though: as a brand new label, we have no sense of how the company is going to operate or what kind of pattern their titles’ pricing will follow after release. For instance, with Arrow, customers have come to expect that (after an initial period passes) a standard title will typically go for a really high price 80% of the time, but then you can often pick it up during sales for about half that the other 20% of the time. With Masters of Cinema, the sales aren’t as frequent as Arrow’s, but you can get older MoC titles from their Amazon store for decent prices (not as good as when they’re having a sale, but better than the prices on their site during non-sale stretches) pretty much year ’round. Will Indicator’s approach be more like Arrow’s, or MoC’s, or something entirely different? Only time will tell.
One thing we currently know about Indicator is that their website only ships to the UK and Ireland, so if they have any Arrow-esque sales on their site American buyers aren’t going to be able to take advantage of them directly. As for buying their titles at other etailers, to this point they’ve yet to dip to a level that would make selling them for prices comparable to Arrow’s and MoC’s viable. That’s not to say it won’t happen in the future — let’s remember that these are still new releases — but the fact is that, right now, we just don’t know.
Further complicating things is the political situation in the UK and its impact on the exchange rate. For those who might not know, Britain voted to leave the European Union last June, a move that sent the British exchange rate tumbling. While it has recovered some, it’s expected that if/when the UK invokes Article 50 (which would formally begin the process of withdrawing from the EU; Prime Minister Theresa May has said they intend to do it by March of 2017) there will be another severe decline in the value of the British Pound — all of which has made ordering British discs for the shop’s inventory like trying to catch a falling knife. That’s why, for the past couple of months, UK orders have largely been limited to requests, perennial sellers that are exchange rate-proof (I often tell people that “Peeping Tom” is going to sell regardless of whether it’s $16 or $19), or severely discounted boutique releases (like the Arrow and MoC sales mentioned above).