honestly I feel like one thing making physical media collecting a bit more stressful than usual is that it's reached a point where in terms of the size of the market it would make more sense for releases to just be handled on a direct-to-consumer global sales type model, but many of the companies involved for some reason feel the urge to stick within the old region model.
Let's consider for example my final RightStuf order that I posted earlier. Every disc in that is a US release that's locked to Region A. This is because the licensor only has the rights to release them in the US and Canada, and presumably the Japanese rights owners want to keep things open to sell the rights to different distributors in Region B territories like the UK and Australia, and don't want an import on the market that holds up the sale of these rights.
But like, is there going to be an English-language Region B release of anything I've got there? I would say the odds are very low to nonexistent, even for UK releaes. In terms of a release that's ACTUALLY local to me, basically no chance at all.1
So like, what's the point of keeping them region restricted?
This is normally presented as "we don't have any choice about how we region lock our discs, since we only license US rights and can't sell them overseas" when distributors are questioned about it. Which is kind of like, well, you CHOOSE to only license US rights and not pursue international sales. Like, that's a choice the distributor makes.
Not all distributors necessarily roll like this. Animeigo when they do kickstarters for anime blu-rays (and we are long overdue for another one of these) will generally try to get the rights for as many regions as they can. Which is great. And like Vinegar Syndrome, while they're a US-based company, does list the regions of their discs on their website, and a fair number are region-free. And they'll ship internationally! And like that's fine, this is a niche thing that one might have to order online, but it's at least available to everyone.
But then there's like I remember a quote from a forum from one of VinSyn's partner labels explaining why he kept things region A - and the argument was "it would be unethical to not do it since I only have the US rights" ok fair enough but then "and in cases where I do have the rights internationally I might want to sublicense them" and like I want to scream at the guy "oh really BUT DO YOU? DO YOU SUBLICENSE ANY OF THESE EXTREMELY NICHE FILMS TO ANYONE? HAVE YOU HAD ANY TAKERS?"
Like, we do have local boutique home video labels, probably the notable ones would be Umbrella and Imprint. And they don't generally spend their time doing localised versions of stuff from the foreign boutique labels. Mostly what they try to do is put out their own unique releases - so that they're not competing with the imports, and can maybe sell them as exports themselves. And like I'm admittedly not SUPER familiar with Imprint, but a lot of Umbrella's stuff is region-free and their website fairly openly advertises that they're quite happy to ship to the US.
Like, the collector home video market is basically already an international mail-order market, in practice. It's just that a few distributors and licensors haven't quite twigged on yet.
thank fuck for multiregion players and proxy shipping services, tbh.
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Keep in mind I'm talking about English language releases here. Like, I could totally see stuff getting French or German or Italian releases, heck, some of this stuff already has, but these are kind of non-overlapping markets for language reasons - like I'm not going to be able to buy the Italian blu-ray of Urusei Yatsura because it's only got subs in Italian, and they're not going to be interested in an English release because it's only got subs in English. Honestly it's kind of a whole separate kettle of fish in terms of multilingual releases that I'm not really qualified to think about but like yeah some issues overlap tbh.