Apple Movie Junkie

We lose Transformers completely and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End to the Purchase Only list for the following HD jems: The 24 Hour Woman, Conspiracy, Kickboxer 3: The Art of War, The Magnificent Seven Ride!, Steep and My Kid Could Paint That.

Along with Transformers and POTC, earlier in the week Ratatouille mysteriously disappeared from the HD rental list, only to become a purchase only title. I hope this isn’t a trend for Apple as an attempt to drive people to purchase A List titles to please the studios or pad their “purchase” sales numbers when it comes time to brag about how successful this new “purchase” venture is.

Citing a Wall Street Journal article, Appleinsider claims that Apple is selling movies above wholesale cost out of frustration with the lackluster performance of it’s video service. Read the entire post here.

The New York Times online has an article about slowing Blu-Ray sales. Apparently upconverting standard DVD players are the problem. Do we see a crack opening for Apple TV. Read more.

30 Days of Night and Demolition Man are now available to rent in HD. And I hope that everyone got their fix of Transformers because it’s now gone completely. No rental and no purchase.

The more things change the more they stay the same. Some of our regular visitors may have noticed that we have made some slight changes to our site. Specifically the right hand column. Due to Apple’s addition of movie purchases to Apple TV, it has become clear to us that it would be near to impossible to keep up with all the rental titles plus purchase titles. And Apple in no way helps in identifying what is a purchase and what is a rental until you actually dive into the movie information. Does anyone else think this muddies up the entire rental process in Apple TV? For the sake of usability I hope Apple has a interface update coming soon.

So what does this mean for Apple TV Junkie? Well, we’re going back to where we started. We are going to direct our focus on the one area where Apple has continued to lag, finding and listing HD titles. After all the tag line says “The Complete Apple TV HD Movie List”. So the HD number count will remain.

We will also continue to announce any new titles, SD rentals or purchases, which we find or which Apple may announce through the iTunes Store. We would like to thank all of our site visitors who have supported Apple TV Junkie up to this point and we look forward to continuing to doing what we do best, offering the most complete list of Apple TV HD movies around.

I’m two out of five for March release titles this week and considering we are out of April the remaining titles should show up any day now. But will they be rentals or for purchase? I’m sticking to Apple’s claim of the 30 day rule and expect new rentals to show up 30 days from the DVD release. Below I added the DVD release date for each title. Technically we should be able to count 30 days from that date and expect that movie to become available to rent. We’re watching Apple.

March Titles
Bee Movie (3-11-08)
Dan in Real Life
Sleuth
Love in the time of Cholera (3-18-08)
The Mist (3-25-08)

Possible April Titles
Sweeney Todd (4-1-08)
Unbreakable (4-1-08)
There will Be Blood (4-8-08)
Walk Hard (4-8-08)
AVP:Requiem (4-15-08)
Juno (4-15-08)