Not that I ever expect "bargains" over at EMP, but crazy bids for all things SW in tonight's auction. All current bids if ending now will be Bruce's highest realized prices ever for these items---Empire insert already well over double the highest, ROTJ insert 1.5x the highest, the half sheet over 1.25x the highest (and not even that great a copy).
Not sure if it's the hype machine going for Episode 7, or if people (well a few of them anyway) all of a sudden have uncovered some disposable income, but wow.
I was planning to bid on a few myself but instead just let my jaw drag along on the floor. In this case it looks like it was a bidding war between two people possibly looking to build an instant collection. If either of them dropped out the bidding would have been more along normal pricing. Congrats to both the new owners and the sellers.
I being a Star Wars nut who seems to be a bit OCD on the subject at best charted the pricing trends on SW posters for theater releases from the Special Edition on and found the prices followed a predictable trend that I expect them to follow in part this time as well.
Leading up to the other releases the market dried up in places like E-Bay and other mass sales sites where posters had previously been relatively plentiful. This part has already started. From there there was a stagnate period where we are now where people held on to them letting them trickle out more slowly followed by a steady increase in prices from approximately 5-6 months prior to the theater release until about a month from the release while people tried to get any copies they could locate hoping for a quick investment payoff. At around a month prior to the release pretty much everything disappeared and anything that was left was priced so excessively that virtually nobody would buy. At approximately a week before the movies release everyone started to dump the posters on the market at the same time at inflated prices of 3x-4x time normal saturating the market causing them to fall over the next two to three weeks selling at prices that were approximately 50% higher than they were 7+ months earlier before bottoming out at around the same price they were again 7+ months prior. In some cases they were actually cheaper for a short time on the really common copies. Once the influx ended the prices rose again by 15-20% over the next couple of months leveling out there and then taking on a more standard model rising slowly as would be expected for any popular collectible until the next movie and then started all over again.
This is how it worked with the more common posters anyway. For the true rarities where there are only a handful of known copies and lower print run posters there was a different curve.
For the new movies I expect a similar model but if Disney does justice to them the curve I feel will be much steeper and there will not be as much of a dump as new collectors come into the market scooping copies up as well that they will hold onto limiting the available copies later on when the dump occurs. Poster versions like these that typically remained at lower prices due to large quantities being available like the Star Wars Style D for example I expect to be the focus of many new buyers as they will still be easier to find and see the greatest overall climb in prices as the remaining copies are bought. I have been watching the pricing trends on these and so far they are following along. Rarer US posters that only have a handful of known copies or had small print runs but are highly desirable like the Style C I expect to see priced out of the normal collectors hands. Higher end rares like the concert poster though I expect to remain stagnate or see a smaller increase unless two people enter into a bidding war like tonight. Foreign rares I actually expect to stay stagnate or actual crash as previously hard to find pieces start coming out of the woodwork. This is what happened for example with the exploding Vader head Polish poster that once commanded as much as $1000 and has now dropped by 50-75% as more and more hit the market. Normal foreign print runs I expect will see the same curve as the US posters but with much lower peaks and settle back to around where they were before the increases started. This is how most of them were in the past.
As always there will be exceptions to the rule here and there. I also may be completely nuts, some of you already know that part is likely true.
