Most 'Romulus' Limited VHS Preorders Went to eBay Scalpers
Revisio-News #7: Opportunists are exploiting Alien and VHS fans
On October 30, the limited VHS edition of Alien Romulus (2024, dir. Fede Alvarez) became available for pre-order via Walmart’s online store. By November 2, it had gone out of stock. However, the majority of the units was not bought up by fans of the VHS format or the Alien film series. As I will show in this article, it instead went to opportunistic scalpers that would promptly start reselling their copies on eBay.
The Romulus VHS Edition
Imagine you want to get a copy of the Alien Romulus limited VHS edition. Maybe you read an interview with director Fede Alvarez, where he talks about his love for the format and how he convinced the studio to do something special for the film’s home video release. Maybe you’re just excited by the prospect of seeing a new movie via a media delivery technology that you continued to use long after the majority of media consumers declared it obsolete. In any case, you’re interested.
So, you go to the official Walmart Pre-Order page for it and discover that the limited VHS edition had very quickly sold out. You do some digging and you discover that there are copies, still brand new and unopened, somehow available for order on a different site - eBay. Only there it costs about twice as much and will arrive a few weeks to a few months after the official December 3 release date.
And then you start wondering if maybe the reason it went out of stock that fast is because the people who sell on eBay bought up a huge number of those limited copies, if not all of them, just to resell them later and profit off people like you.
Now, I want to clarify that this is not exactly my story.
I personally didn’t like Alien Romulus all that much and while I was interested in possibly getting the VHS version as I am a collector, I was turned off by the already-exorbitant official price tag of $60 per copy. And I know I wasn’t the only one.*
* If you ask me, for a VHS release of a new movie, this price is simply ridiculous, especially considering that virtually every other physical edition is actually cheaper. Compare this to how a company like Witter Entertainment offers multiple variants and pricing tiers of their limited VHS editions for recent titles like Terrifier or The Void. A ‘standard’ release typically comes with some exclusive bonuses like director introductions and costs about $25. Higher price tiers will get you additional extras, such as special artwork or packaging.
But I was legitimately shocked by what I saw on eBay: a whopping 56 listings for the Romulus VHS preorder. Across them, I found 278 copies* of the VHS edition listed as either available for purchase or already sold at $100-140 per copy.
*The actual number should be higher. Multiple sellers did not provide exact numbers, but listed “more than 10” copies as available. Moreover, in the month since they first began to show up, some listings might have been taken down as the sellers sold off their stock.
Many of these vendors had about 1-3 copies in stock. However, several had up to 10 or over. One seller had a record of 22 copies and had sold 19 of them at $110, which suggests he made (or, more accurately, stands to make) about $1000 in profit.
There’s absolutely no way that these VHS copies did not come from the Walmart online pre-order page. They are all brand new, factory-sealed.
And the delivery date is typically a few weeks after the official December 3 release date, meaning the sellers are first going to need to wait for Walmart to actually deliver their pre-order copies before they ship them out to the new buyers.
Heck, one listing even provides an image of a Walmart delivery tracking page to confirm that the seller will be getting a copy soon.
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What percent of the preorder stock did the scalpers get?
At the moment, we don’t know for certain.
Neither Disney, nor Walmart have disclosed how many copies the Romulus VHS was actually limited to, so it is not known how many copies were available for pre-order, nor how many will be made available for physical retail on December 3.* But there are multiple signs that most of the preorders were bought up by the scalpers.
*In fact, Disney’s press releases have not made it clear even if the Romulus VHS would be available in physical retail, but a Walmart customer representative confirmed to me that yes, there will be copies coming to physical Walmart stores.
It’s important to note that, even by the standard of physical media limited editions, retro-VHS versions nowadays are issued in super-small quantities. Though the numbers can vary, depending on the title and distributor, it’s very common for titles to not receive more than a few hundred copies per edition. VHS, after all, is today a super-niche market, one unlikely to grow unless new VCRs are produced.*
Vice Press, for instance, limited the standard VHS editions of Evil Dead 2 (1987, dir. Sam Raimi) and Suspiria (1977, dir. Dario Argento) to 500 copies. Vinegar Syndrome appears to cap its ‘Degausser Video’ label’s limited VHS releases at 300.*
Witter Entertainment nowadays seems to offer standard VHS editions for as long ‘as supplies last’ and restocks them depending on demand. But it used to be common for it to print only 150 copies of a given title and/or edition.*
*All 150 copies of the Psycho Goreman (2020, dir. Steve Kostanski) limited run VHS sold out very quickly in 2021, leading to the title being restocked.
It is safe to assume that Disney, in the course of their marketing research, looked at other companies’ numbers to help determine the supply and demand for retro-VHS editions before deciding to release their first real VHS in years.
Based on this, the fact that the pre-order copies were gone in 3 days and that Disney would also be saving copies for physical retail, I’d estimate the Romulus VHS preorder stock did not exceed 500 copies. This is supported by November 28 reports from multiple fans that ordered early that their pre-orders were cancelled, indicating that Walmart actually oversold the Romulus VHS edition.
So, it’s almost certain that the 278 copies currently offered on Ebay constitute the majority of the pre-orders Walmart had available.
How could this have happened?
Well, for one thing, Disney and Walmart offered no advance notices to prospective customers about the fact that the limited edition would actually become available for pre-order. Rather, the pre-order option just suddenly popped up on Walmart’s website a mere 10 days after being announced for release in December.*
*I suspect the VHS version was a last-minute addition to the other December 3 physical releases - DVD, BluRay and 4K UHD - announced back at the end of September.
Thus, the target audience consisting of VHS collectors and Alien franchise fans had no time to actually prepare for the release, essentially guaranteeing that a good number of them would miss the pre-order window.
On top of that, Walmart clearly didn’t take any measures to ensure that a single customer couldn’t purchase and hoard multiple units.* Of course, few VHS fans would have the budget or need to purchase up to 10 copies of the release or more.
But for scalpers, this created the perfect opportunity to snatch up as many early copies as they could afford (about 5 copies on average) and then profit from the resulting lack of availability at the original store.
*For comparison, both Vinegar Syndrome and Witte Entertainment usually limit one unit of a limited edition VHS per customer, with the latter specifying that they delete duplicate orders.
Unsurprisingly, some collectors and fans feel unhappy or screwed over.
Still, some have apparently chosen to indeed purchase the VHS version from eBay. I personally think folks that really want this edition should wait until the Walmart stores actually get their copies in or until bootlegs inevitably start spreading.*
*That, after all, was one of the appeals of VHS - bootleg circulation, easy reproduction and ‘aesthetics of access,’ as Lucas Hilderbrand would describe it.
Buying them at outrageous prices from scalpers is only going to embolden them to pull more shit like this in the future.
Expect More Issues
As a whole, this situation does not bode well for the future of Disney’s foray into VHS releases. The company has simply failed to clearly communicate with its intended audience and so paved the way for them to be exploited by unethical opportunists.
Why not provide at the outset a clear and detailed press release or page that specifies how many copies of the limited edition are available, as well as when and where it will be sold? I wonder if perhaps the lack of disclosure stems from a desire to test the waters for interest. That is, based on the preorder demand, Disney could adjust the (unreported) limited number of available copies appropriately over time.
One thing is clear though: at the very least, Disney and Walmart need to adopt safeguards to prevent scalpers from being able to exploit fans in the future.
The physical retail rollout will hopefully help mitigate the situation.
But honestly, given the way this pre-order fiasco has unfolded, I expect even more issues to crop up with the Romulus VHS edition once we get to the release date.
But what do you think?Were most of the VHS pre-order copies purchased by the fans? Was the edition already overpriced? Will Romulus help revive the VHS market for movies in general? Can VHS really come back if the intended audience continues to be treated like this? Please,
If you’re interested in the Alien film series, please consider reading the following:
Also, check out some thoughts on the Alien 3 Workprint Cut and the similarities of its climax to that of The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
I didn’t know they did this VHS release, that’s a cool idea. Shame I don’t have a VHS player anymore…
I have no objection to the resurrection of VHS as a format, but it might be more wise to concentrate on brick-and-mortar sales than online ones if this continues to be an issue.