A blue period for Hollywood?

On a recent muggy afternoon, Best Buy sales specialist Sheikh Ullah lugs out the last Blu-ray player in stock in the cavernous West L.A. store. It's a fluke that the machine is even here, explains Ulla. The store got 10 of the $1,000 Samsung machines last week. This is the only one left, because its intended buyer -- who ordered and paid for the machine that plays the new high-definition DVDs -- got impatient and ordered another Blu-ray player online that arrived first.

"It's a really hot product," says the salesman, looking for an appropriate way to describe the joy that overcomes a gadgethead when he or she scores one of these players. "It's like they have a piece of the moon in their hands," he says.

This is poetry to Hollywood's ears. All over the movie business, people are hoping that the new high-definition DVDs -- either in its Blu-ray form or its rival HD-DVD -- will take off and mitigate the reality that hangs over the home entertainment business. The DVD go-go years are over.

For many in Hollywood, it's as if they just discovered Santa isn't real. No matter how bad the movies, the box office, the marketing costs, the bloated star salaries, there was always salvation in the shiny little disc. The studios could make and market one for $5 and then sell it to consumers for more than $17, a tidy profit of at least $12 bucks per disc. The disc generated rivers of cash. "Finding Nemo" is the all-time bestseller on DVD; it made $340 million at the U.S. box office and $537 million in home video.

The new high-def DVDs allow viewers to see the pores of Robin Williams or Brad Pitt in all their glory. One only has to look at the DVD section at Best Buy to understand the real place that the new high-def DVD holds in the home entertainment firmament. The retail chain features two tiny stand-alone displays of a dozen Blu-ray titles, largely from Sony, and a dozen HD-DVD titles, primarily from Warner Bros. A customer in painter's pants and baseball cap walks over to check out the "Terminator 2" title but quickly leaves when he realizes that he can't play this format in his regular DVD machine.

Best Buy features seven aisles of regular DVDs with hundreds of titles of movies and TV shows, and a handful of consumers are browsing the merchandise.

The DVD business is still growing -- it's just no longer giddy.