Movie Posters as "Collectibles"
I prefer to classify movie posters as "art" rather
than "collectibles." Does this mean I am against collecting
movie posters? Not at all. It means that I hope a person buys
a poster because he has a personal interest in what he buys not
because he is searching for something (or anything) that might
have a potential for going up in value. A poster may go up in
monetary value; it may
not. If it doesn't what is the person left with (just a piece
of paper?) if the motive for buying was for investment purposes?
I would imagine he would be very disappointed, especially if
he were persuaded to buy a poster with the promise that it would
go up in value, but if he bought a poster because he was attracted
to it because of the visual appeal of its artwork, I would imagine
he would be happy regardless of whether the poster retained it's
value, went up in value or went down in value.
My rule of thumb: The amount I'm willing to pay for a poster
is directly proportional to amount of pleasure I would
expect to receive from seeing it on display in my home or office.
For me this is the true value of the poster, not what
it might be worth in dollars at some point in the future.
The Market for "Collectibles"
Retail Market
Contemporary movie posters are primarily sold in the retail
market, with the cost to the consumer based upon the amount a
store pays for the item plus markup to cover overhead and to
make a modest profit. It might be possible to build
a small collection of contemporary movie posters for the same
amount that someone might pay for just one expensive
old poster.
In contrast to contemporary movie posters, old movie posters
are primarily sold in the collectibles market, with
prices determined by what consumers are willing to pay. For example,
the price of a collectible may be 0 to 100 times (or
even more) the actual cost to the seller, especially when there
are more people who want to buy an item than there are items
available to be sold. If supply overreaches demand, an item may
not sell at all, sell at close to seller's cost or, in some cases,
below seller's cost. Thus, the profit a seller makes from selling
an old poster in the collectibles market can range from enormous
to modest to even none at all.
There is nothing to prevent sellers (and some do) from selling
old movie posters using fixed prices, but it's likely that if
they do, they set the prices of posters based upon what they
"are going for" (or in some cases what they think a
poster "should be going for") in the collectibles
market, rather than based upon the cost of the poster plus markup
as would be the case if they were selling old posters using a
retail method of pricing. One of the problems with pricing old
posters is condition. Are the
posters that a seller is offering in the same condition as the
posters that were used to set prices? If a seller is using other
people's data for determining prices -- that is, he is setting
prices based not upon posters they have sold previously but the
posters that others have sold -- he may run the risk of overpricing
or underpricing their posters.
Are Old Posters Better than Contemporary?
If old posters are sold in the collectibles market, does that
mean that they are better than contemporary posters?
I don't think anyone can provide a definitive answer to that
question. For example, if someone collects contemporary posters
the answer would likely be an emphatic "NO!"
but if he or she collects only old posters the answer will likely
be an emphatic "YES!" If someone collects
both contemporary and old posters, it would probably not be an
issue at all.
Collectibles: Long-Term Demand or Fad?
Demand for collectible items can be long-term or
short-lived. When brief, we consider this buying phenomenon "a
fad." Prices for old movie posters
have gone up over the last decade but the jury is still out whether
this reflects a long-term trend based upon a growing demand for
old movie posters or just another passing "fad" in
collecting. It appears that prices may have begun to level off
now and for some old posters started to decline. This may or
may not be a signal that interest in old movie posters has begun
to fade, but could very well be a normal reaction to the number
of posters that have flooded the market in the past 5 to 7 years.
When prices reach a high point or peak, items tend to enter the
market at a rate much faster than they can be sold. This pattern
of activity eventually causes prices to fall when sellers who
were expecting high prices find that they cannot sell the items
they put on the market for high prices and settle for lower prices
to reduce excess inventory. Another factor may be the large number
of casual sellers that have entered the marketplace in the past
5 to 7 years with little experience in retailing or the mail
order business who have scared off potential buyers because they
don't trust that items being offered are accurately represented
or graded, or have received an
item damaged in the mail because the seller did not know how
to properly pack it. A third factor could be that all the high
quality copies have been sold and the ones on the market now
are of a less desirable, inferior quality. For example, all of
the pristine, unused copies of Breakfast at Tiffany's may already
be in the hands of collectors and the ones on the market now
are used copies with varying degrees of wear and tear -- pinholes,
seam wear and separations, missing pieces of paper, staining
-- that require extensive repair or have undergone extensive
repair to make them marketable.
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