Just a few days ago there was a lot of talk about the large amounts of money people were asking for VHS copies of ‘The Lion King’ and other Disney movies. It didn’t take long for it to be known what the trick was and no one was going to pay those amounts, but now the news has broken that a copy of ‘Terminator’ in the same format has been sold for $32,500 this month, which would be equivalent to about €28,653.
Logically, this is not just a copy of James Cameron’s film, since it is a unit of the first edition on VHS of ‘Terminator’ in the United States in a high level of preservation. The sale has been made through the ComicConnect website and is being commented on in many media, but there is something in it that it looks suspicious.
The sale was completed three days after the sale was put into auction format, but the truth is that there was no war between several buyers that shot the price up to $ 32,500. Actually, there was only one bid that went straight to that amount, a mystery shopper who wanted it so much he didn’t want any competition, or maybe a way to start driving up the price of VHS on the collector’s market?
Legitimate sale or speculative tactic?
In favor of the idea of a legitimate sale we have that the vhs format was very little extended when this first edition of ‘Terminator’ appeared in the United States. Copies in this format were sold for an average of between 50 and 100 dollars, and it was not until several years later that the retail price dropped considerably, coinciding with the explosion in popularity of the format.
However, no copy of ‘The Terminator’ had ever sold for anything remotely similar. There is always the option of infatuation, but there are other precedents such as the world of comics or retro video games that invite us to think about the possibility that VHS collecting is headed for a price bubble.
In this video you have a good explanation of what has happened in recent years in the retro video game market. In just four years, the record price paid for a video game passed $30,000 to $2 millionalso being a copy of the same video game.
This is due to multiple intersecting interests, from speculators wanting to get more money for the securities it puts up for sale, to auction houses taking a percentage of the sale price. Everyone is happy, including the company in charge of certifying the state of conservation, which plays a key role in the price that the article in question can reach.
Well, the buyer who has to pay more probably not so much, although he had simply acquired it with the intention of reselling it more expensively later. Let us not look for innocents where perhaps there are none.
Our colleagues at Magnet already commented in the case of ‘The Lion King’ that it was still an exercise in speculation and basically based on nothing. With this purchase of ‘Terminator’ we go one step further, because it is no longer being sold without there being a market at that price. The big question now is whether or not this will continue. If so, we already have a successor for retro video games and prepare to read news about sales at record prices every so often.
Yes indeed, they will be copies of rare editions, the one you can have at home from a millionaire circulation of the heyday of vhs will continue to be worth as little as it has been up to now. Between very little and nothing.