In the 80s and early-to-mid 90s, most movies weren't offered for sale to consumers. Big blockbuster movies sometimes were, but those were the exception. Places like Blockbuster or your corner video rental store bought VHS movies for around $70/ea and then rented them to consumers for $3 or so. That changed somewhere around the late 90s, when people began buying movies on VHS and DVD, and the price dropped significantly.

Source: I worked for a small video store in the early 90s.

>Places like Blockbuster or your corner video rental store bought VHS movies for around $70/ea //

Isn't that just rental prices vs consumer prices. It's a tort to by the consumer copy and rent it out so large companies could never get away with that instead they bought a more expensive copy that is basically the tape with license to rent it??

Turns out it's more complicated than that: https://entertainment-industry.knoji.com/the-history-of-the-... & http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=692441.

Would be interested in similar info with global comparison, eg how was the situation different in UK, Germany, etc..

I remember movies selling for over US$100 when VHS first hit the streets.

The only "typo" is crediting Amazon and Netflix with the price reductions: movies were commonly $20 long before those two showed up. No, what killed the $100 movie were people going "$100 to own _Weekend at Bernie's_? Oh, hell no!" Remember, we lived quite fulfilled lives before we were allowed to "own" our own copies of movies, we weren't missing anything.

Oh, and rental stores that popped up shortly after. From my POV at the time, owning the VHS tape was reserved for the rental stores who would profit from it and the overly-privileged. The rest of us just rented at $10 a pop. Want to see it again? Go rent it again.

EDIT: somewhat related to pricing: would have to look it up to be sure, but I recall blank VHS tapes going for >$20 when they first came out.

Yes, but the other part of the sentence is all wrong, the gradual shift from this pricing model to more like $20 a tape happened from the mid 80s to early 90s.

Not a typo, but misleading. Very few people bought tapes when they were $70-$100. The only purchasers were video stores. There wasn't a slow glide, it went from very high down to $20 quickly, a few years after VHS killed Beta.