Goatmoose

Hey, remember that movie that won Best Picture this year, as well as all those other awards? Remember how it was a really big deal, involving mass amounts of people from England, USA and India? Wouldn’t it possibly be cool to own it on DVD and see all the extra stuff that went into its creation?

Tough, Johnson.

In an effort to dissuade people from going to video stores and renting DVDs just to watch the special features, FOX has been sending movie-only discs to rental outlets and putting the bonus jollies only on the discs sold in stores, forcing people to buy. However, the Slumdog DVDs that shipped on its release are missing all the special features it claims to contain, such as a making-of featurette, deleted scenes and a commentary from director Danny Boyle. This pertains only to the standard DVD issues, not the Blu-Ray discs – but for real, most people are still doing the regular DVD dance. Clearly the intended rental discs went out to buyers, which is a super big mistake.

It caused quite a hullabaloo. Lots of pissed off people. Lots of cranky folks wanted to see if there is a deleted scene where the oldest version of Salim that looks like MJ throws on his shades and does the Thriller dance. Fortunately, a remedy came quick. This is from the product’s listing on Amazon.com:

DVD Alert: We are aware that special features were missing from a number of Slumdog Millionaire DVDs ordered before April 2, 2009. This issue does not occur on the Blu-ray version. Fox has set up a hotline telephone number (1-888-223-4369) for those consumers who may have purchased a DVD version that does not contain special features. Upon calling the hotline, these consumers will be able to have their disc replaced for one containing special features. Fox regrets any inconvenience this has caused.

Which brings me to my next thought… we’re still using the word “hotline?”