VIDEO : $15 Movies Are in the Picture From Paramount and HBO

Remember when you had to wait several years for your favorite movie, initially priced at $80 or $90, to drop to $30 or maybe even $25?

Now you may only have to wait 18 months--and the price may be under $15.

Paramount and HBO are leading the low-price charge with late summer releases in that price range.

Beginning Sept. 16, HBO will market horror titles such as “Return of the Living Dead,” “Howling II” and “Dawn of the Dead” for $14.99.

Paramount’s 15-title package, due Aug. 2, is much more impressive. Included are such hits as “Beverly Hills Cop,” “Witness,” “Flashdance,” “Trading Places,” “48 HRS.” and the four “Star Trek” movies--at $14.95 each.

Movies priced this cheaply on home video are not new. IVE offered a Rambo movie for $14.95 last year, for example, but generally, most of the low-priced movies weren’t major titles. Nor were they good-quality tapes. They were made for viewing at the slowest VCR speed, which saves tape and, consequently, money for the manufacturers. But at that slow speed, images are not as sharp, the colors are not as vivid and the audio is frequently uneven.

The Paramount and HBO releases, however, are at SP--the fastest speed.

Fans shouldn’t be thanking Paramount and HBO for dropping prices. They should be thanking mass merchants such as Target and K mart, who have revolutionized the home-video sales market. These mass merchants have begun stocking low-priced tapes strictly for sales, leaving rentals to video retailers.

“The expansion of the mass-merchant market allows us to market these titles at a lower price,” said Eric Doctorow, Paramount’s senior vice president and general manager. “If the only market was video retailers, we wouldn’t be dropping prices like this. Most of these $15 tapes will be shipped to mass merchants.”

That’s because they can make up for in volume what the studio is giving up in profit margin on each low-priced cassette, he explained.

Will the price drop much below $15?

“We have no plans for market titles at a lower price in the near future,” Doctorow said. “Going lower isn’t profitable for us.”

But some of these low-priced titles will be available at even lower prices anyway. They’ll be discounted by the mass merchants, possibly as low as $11-$12.

Though no other major video companies have any immediate plans to drop their prices below $15, industry speculation is that they will soon climb aboard the low-pricing bandwagon. It’s not likely that they’ll leave that growing market to Paramount and HBO.