Quote:
Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward
It's A Wonderful Life was languishing in obscurity until it fell into US public domain. After it fell into PD and started being shown every Christmas, it became very popular. (To the point of the original copyright owner finding an excuse to pull it back out of PD.)
How many other obscure movies/acts might have the same thing happen to them?
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Sure, a lot of the reason that I've seen so many of those films is because they appeared regularly in syndication on TV. Syndication was the driving business model behind older movies before DVD's and streaming.
It will be interesting to see how things shake out. Logically, I think that many of these movies will end up in streaming movie services. However, so many movie companies look at their catalogue as a gold mine and try to extract every last penny they can out of it, pricing themselves out of the market of what people are willing to pay to access such a service. Customers have to know that they want to watch a particular movie before they will buy it. Much of the time that requires seeing it on something they already are paying for.