Sigourney Weaver and David Duchovny’s star power wasn’t enough to stop one of Jake Kasdan’s movies all but disappearing for a while.
This weekend, director Jake Kasdan’s new film, the megabudget festive flick Red One, is in cinemas. He’s also linked with directing a Jumanji film for the third time, and also is one of the filmmakers announced as making a new LEGO movie.
Across his career, he’s made Zero Effect, Orange County, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, Bad Teacher, Sex Tape, Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle and Jumanji: The Next Level. That’s just as a feature director, with a whole bunch of television stuff as well.
Yet in the midst of his run of films, he also brought Sigourney Weaver and David Duchovny in 2006, for a low budget independent film called The TV Set. If you’re in the UK in particular, you’ve likely not heard of it at all, given that it never got a release over here, and also – as of November 2024 – it’s not in print on UK DVD (coming back to that), nor does it have a presence on any streaming service whatsoever.
This is a growing trend. Try and find, say, a 1960s thriller on a streaming service and good luck with that. Try and find an independent that might have got a DVD release once, and you’re playing roulette with the second hand disc market. The narrow focus of streaming services means that the availability of movies ironically seems to be in decline.
I chatted to Jake Kasdan in London this week, as I’m increasingly trying to talk to filmmakers about their ‘disappearing’ films. It’s odd that a movie with such names – and Judy Greer, Ioan Gruffudd, Philip Baker Hall and Fran Kranz are in the strong ensemble too – that’s also relatively recent should have gone missing.
The TV Set is a film I’ve not seen, and can’t instantly legally see in the UK. It debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival in the US in 2006, before getting a limited cinema release in 2007. 20th Century Fox then put out a DVD in America in 2007 as well, even adding an extra feature or two.
Kasdan seemed surprised when I told him I had no immediate legal access to the film, as you can hear in the podcast episode below. “It’s one of my favourites”, he admitted. “It’s unlike any other movie I’ve done”. “Some of [my films] I want to return to more than others, but that’s one that I love.”
He explained the problem. “By the time it came out, I knew that nobody was going to see it by the way it was being released.”
In terms of why it never found an audience, “I didn’t feel like it was quite the movie’s fault”, he argued. For context, I’ve chatted to Jake Kasdan a couple of times now, and the inflection wasn’t arrogance, just the feeling that he felt he’d done a good film.
What happened though was the distributor in the US went under, he explained. “You couldn’t see it anywhere for a while … there were several years where even in the height of streaming, everything is available somewhere all the time, you just could not find that movie.”
Kasdan started making enquiries himself as to where the film had gone, and tried to get it made available. A stroke of luck opened up in the US, as “without us actually doing anything, somebody bought the library. And they put it up. Now you can get it in the US on video on demand”.
Yet given that the UK distribution was never really established – there’s one out-of-print DVD from 2013, but it miss-spells Kasdan’s name on the cover – the availability of the film is extremely limited, in spite of the star wattage involved in it. Depressingly, it can be really hard to legally watch a film, baffling given the technology now available.
The best bet for UK watchers is to get hold of the Shout Factor Blu-ray that finally surfaced in 2020, and is only available in America. That, or get a plane ticket to the US, sit in a hotel room, load up a US video on demand service, and get a plane home for tea time. It’s not particularly environmentally friendly, though, so you’ll need to offset your carbon.
At least there’s a sort of happy ending to The TV Set, but it highlights a growing problem. Even films from the last 20 years are falling through the cracks of currently home entertainment distribution. Feel free to leave any further examples in the comments.
And inevitably, if there’s a moral to the story: physical media releases really, really matter.
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