I never quite "got" the Fox Movie Channel.Considering how many titles must be in the Fox library, the same ones kept popping up again and again - and only a precious few were letterboxed, usually the more recent titles. "April Love"? Forget it.
Anyway, this halfhearted attempt to celebrate the films of Twentieth Century-Fox has been altered.
Very recently (and quietly), the Fox Movie Channel was reduced to daytime programming exclusively, with the remainder of the schedule handed over, piggyback-style, to something called FXM, or the FX Movie Channel, which is devoted to, well, mall movies. And, unlike the now-limited Fox Movie Channel, FXM airs with "limited commercial breaks."
Happy New Year!
8 comments:
A big boo to this change. Watched LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD on FXM the other night, and those commercial breaks didn't seem all that 'limited' to me. Plus, they dropped out curse words and there were a few suspicious transitions, such as quick fades that I'm pretty sure weren't there when I saw it in the theater.
I know it must be tough in the ever-changing world of cable to pull eyeballs away from all the competing channels, to say nothing of the internet, but it seems to me that a move like this only alienates the established brand's core audience.
Jay- It's ridiculous. Given that films can be seen intact almost anywhere on the tube these days - Turner, HBO, Showtime, The Movie Channel, Cinemax, Encore, I could go on - why would Fox do something so patently supid?
To say noting of Netflix, Netflix Instant, local libraries that loan DVDs, etc. They'll snag more channel surfers, I suppose (that's how they got me for LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD -- it was nearing bedtime and we just wanted some popcorn fare for distraction, and we'd see it in the theater so we didn't care that it had already started). But I can't imagine anyone setting their DVR for it, or planning an evening around it.
It seems like Fox is licensing a lot more of their classic titles to TCM of late. I wonder if that was in conjunction with the new Fox Movie Channel?
Kevin! I think you're giving Fox too much credit. My hunch is that both its home entertainment and movie channel arms are being overseen by very young people who have no sense of film history and think that movies actually started with the "Star War" series.
Yeah, I know what you mean. I was dumbfounded that Fox let their recent 75th anniversary go by with so little fanfare. Re-packaging classic DVD titles and hardly any new titles on the Fox Movie Channel is no way to celebrate.
I was hoping they would celebrate in high fashion with new titles licensed to DVD and its network. Wrong again.
Let's see how Paramount and Universal celebrate their centennial. I'm not holding my breath.
After watching a couple of titles on the new FXM, I figured out what they're doing:
They're using their broadcast prints with the original fade out/in of the old commercial breaks, just using less of them. (I guess that's their idea of giving us less commercials.) Jeez, they can't even use fresh versions of these films? Really? They're letterbox, but they're censored & edited versions...
This completely seems like a 'bean-counter' move; just a low-cost way of re-presenting their library...amazing & disheartening...
Richard- Disheartening, yes. And someone at Fox was presumably well-paid to come up with this bad idea.
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