I've been reading about the ...
Question: I've been reading about the movie Bubble being the first film ever released simultaneously on TV, in movie theaters and on DVD. I don't know why, but I keep thinking some other movie already did that. Do you know if it really was the very first?
Answer: Steven Soderbergh's Bubble (2006) was definitely the first to come to theaters, cable and DVD at virtually the same time — it was shown on HDNet cable on the same Friday it opened in theaters, although it actually came to DVD four days later, because Tuesday is the standard day of the week DVDs (and videos before them) go on sale in stores. But there are a couple of precedents. Back in the 1983 — before DVD was so much as a technological twinkle in anyone's eye and the home-video market barely existed — Universal (a company that had been heavily invested in television since the '60s) tried a similar experiment with The Pirates of Penzance. It didn't go especially well: Theater owners, who had been running scared from TV since the '50s, launched a boycott when they got wind that the film was going to show on pay cable in Los Angeles during its theatrical release. The result was that Universal was only able to book Pirates into 92 theaters. And earlier still, Sir Laurence Olivier's Richard III (1955) aired on NBC the same day it had its U.S. theatrical premiere; it had already played theaters in England.
