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Just last week one of the very best movies of 2007 came out on DVD: "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford."  Upon purchasing the DVD at my local Blockbuster I noticed that there was a HD-DVD special combo edition to be released later this month.  What was different about that item?  A mild 30-minute featurette on Jesse James.  The standard DVD I was buying just had the movie itself.  Not even a theatrical trailer or teaser.

"Assassination" is not a small movie; it has a big star (Brad Pitt) in the lead role, some outstanding crew members (like Roger Deakins as the Director of Photography), lots of costumes, an ambitious score--pretty much all of it on paper reads like a Focus Features Oscar-Bait movie.  Though the film ultimately succeeds on a level more rewarding than an Oscar-hungry flick like say, "Atonement," and made my top ten list of 2007, the film is given the red-headed stepchild treatment on DVD.  The top of the back of the case cover, where usually some highlighted quotes from critics would appear, is replaced by a generic line of plot summary.

This isn't some new trend in Hollywood.  Last summer saw the DVD release of "Zodiac" David Fincher's superior film on the nature of obsession (in this case identifying a killer) and that too found itself stripped of any good extras.  No theatrical trailer there either.

Although "Zodiac" eventually received it's 2-disc treatment in January of 2008 (almost five months after its original DVD release date), consumers and avid film buffs found themselves shelling out another twenty-plus bucks to buy that edition.  And what about the single-disc they bought this past summer?

Obviously there's money to be made in DVD sales.  Films these days are finding shorter and shorter theatrical run spans, as Hollywood keeps pumping multiplexes with everything from 3-D Disney concerts to films that have catchphrases like "From 2 of the 6 writers of "Scary Movie.""  This pushes closer DVD release dates and thus has boatloads of movies spilling out every DVD Tuesday.  Then again, the best way to ensure sales is to keep the consumer coming back to purchase content they can't pirate or buy bootlegged.

I get that part.

But what about the rest of us, who faithfully watch the films in the cinema, eagerly await their DVD debut and then have to wrestle with our own feelings regarding buying it right away or waiting up to a half a year (sometimes longer) just to see some behind-the-scenes snippets?

This also brings up an idea to another topic that I probably won't get into but is worth getting into: How the hell does "The Mummy" (1999) have a handful of DVD editions (even an "Ultimate Edition") that have accumulated up until now?

Who is buying this crap?