In another supplier confrontation, Amazon stops taking preorders for forthcoming Warner movies
Amazon Stops Taking Advance Orders for ‘Lego’ and Other Warner Videos — The Everything Store is shrinking again. Amazon customers who want to order forthcoming Warner Home Video features …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the second front in a campaign Amazon opened weeks earlier, when it refused coming book orders from Hachette in a pricing standoff — the same tactic of making a supplier's titles effectively unpurchasable, now applied to home video. The story traveled unusually widely for a retail contract squabble, with pickups from the Guardian, Washington Post, Businessweek, Wired and Deadline all on or about June 11.
Warner is a fitting target because it has used windowing leverage itself: in early 2012 it made Netflix, Redbox and Blockbuster wait longer for new movies and added restrictions on Netflix DVD queues, while separately deepening ties with Amazon by licensing TV shows to Prime Instant Video that July. The preorder freeze puts that relationship under strain.
First-order effects
- Warner Home Video loses Amazon preorder demand for releases including 'The Lego Movie' during the crucial advance-sales window, pushing buyers toward rival retailers or waiting.
- Amazon signals to every studio and publisher mid-contract that its listing placement is negotiable currency, days after confirming the Hachette dispute was real and ongoing.
Second-order effects
- Competing disc retailers such as Walmart and Target capture preorder traffic Amazon declines, giving them a merchandising argument against Amazon in future studio negotiations.
- Other content suppliers must now price in the risk that Amazon will delist their products in a dispute, raising the value of diversified distribution deals like Warner's own earlier windowing agreements.
Third-order effects
- If withholding listings becomes standard negotiating behavior, Amazon's marketplace shifts from neutral storefront to leverage instrument, inviting scrutiny of whether its scale constitutes gatekeeping over consumer access to media.
- Suppliers respond structurally by strengthening direct-to-consumer and alternative-retail channels, eroding the single-store assumption on which Amazon's buying power rests.
The trend: Amazon is converting its storefront into contractual leverage, repeating against video suppliers the listing-withholding playbook it first ran against publishers in the Hachette dispute.