a quote from ED at LAMP
"Now let's see if I can help a little..
Sonis is a service company that started in 1965 and does what ever the film company needs. If they need warehousing, they provide the storage, if they need distribution, etc, etc. They have slowly expanded until they have become almost like a French version of NSS. The film company brings the job to them and they are set up to handle about everything dealing with assessories for them.
By contract, if the film company wants their posters to be out on the market, they allow Sonis to wholesale them to shops. If they don't, Sonis can't release them. This is what drives collectors nuts.... it breaks OUR 'categorized conception' of a strict film poster. So this makes them a collectors nightmare!
But in many ways, it's a slight variation from what the US studios have done for years. They sell their posters through their stores and online.... and nobody thinks twice about it. Some even sell their older posters.
For about 2 years Warner Brothers tried to cut costs on posters for their video operation, so they issued their theater posters straight to the video stores. Many distributors drop off posters that wind up in collectors shops or dealers selling them online.
It just shakes up 'our' concept of a strict theater poster. But when it boils down to it, it's the same poster, printed by the same printer and from the same batch that was put into the theaters. Where do you draw the line?
What is the difference in the extra posters that are printed that go to the French shops, than the US printer that prints up a couple of extra boxes and sells them out the back door to someone to help make up for the low ball printing costs that they had to give to get the job from the studio. (and this happens WAY more than you think, I know, I've bought hundreds of boxes over the years). How could you tell the difference anyway?
Sonis puts their logo on it, there's nothing 'sneaky' going on. The concern of the hobby should be the people that take a poster and have it printed by some printer and then try to fraudulently pass it off as a poster released by the film company as part of their promotion.
I hope this helps and not cause more confusion,
ed "
