I also have a large collection of Beta movies and find it very strange that no one one seems to know the last Beta movie released. It is well documented what was the last laserdisc and the last VHS tape.
Does anyone have an idea? The newest tape I have is the The Fugitive with Harrison Ford released in 1994. I have been looking for the old BlockBuster catalogs that used to sit out in the stores that you could use to special order movies. They listed catalog numbers for Beta, VHS and Laserdiscs.

Interesting question. I imagine this is the guy to ask if you haven't asked him already . . .

http://www.betainfoguide.net/

But I think his expertise might only be for the North American market. Since the last Betamax VCRs ever made rolled off the assembly lines in Japan in 2002, the Japanese market might have supported Beta a little longer.

Thanks for the suggestion. I've corresponded with him off and on and contributed some info to his web site. He is more hardware oriented and did not have any idea abut the last commercially released Beta tape.

That is crazy, though newsrooms have used beta for almost the whole time until now. They have only now began the changeover to digital I believe.

I believe they used Betacam and not actually Betamax.

I worked in the broadcast industry for a while and Betacam and Consumer Beta used a different recording format. The small Betacam tapes were physically the same as the standard consumer Beta tapes. Betacam machines also could use a larger tape package for extended time.

Indeed, Betacam is a component video format with 300 lines of resolution (even higher with Betacam SP) with 120 lines of color, while Betamax is a color under format like VHS. So they're not compatible.

Here's a really interesting page that describes the many different video formats over the ages (including Betamax, Betacam, Betacam SP--oh yeah, and Laserdisc too!):

http://www.videointerchange.com/video-history.htm

Back to the subject of last movie on Beta, I first thought that since Sony bought Columbia Pictures that the movie might have been a Columbia title, but according to this LA Times article . . .

Sony Finally Throws the Betamax on Scrapheap

There's this tidbit of infoSo I'm surmising that the VERY last title might be from Disney or Paramount.

Probably, as the quote said they were releasing 20 at a time so its a real challenge to figure out what tape it may be. Which is why I keep trying to find out.....

That might be impossible then. 20 isnt anything. You might have some very obscure titles out there.

This is kind of amusing.

For fun, I decided to do a search for beta movies on YahooJapan to see if they supported the format further than the US. Came across this title on Beta:

Hershell Gordon Lewis' 'Scum of the Earth'

And saw on the cover that the movie was put out by "Box Office Spectaculars." Now the only "Box Office Spectaculars" I know about was the company that released Lucio Fulci's Cat in the Brain in 1999:

http://www.lddb.com/laserdisc/10446/BOS ... rain-(1990)

So I was thinking, "Wow! This might be the latest Beta release I've ever seen!"

But then I did a search on Box Office Spectaculars, turns out that this particular Box Office Spectaculars was a film distribution and production house back in the 60s. Might have been HG Lewis' own since they seemingly only released his movies:

http://www.imdb.com/company/co0080238/

So . . . yeah, got a little ahead of myself there!

You probably will be able to figure out the last US release, or the last few, but not likely worldwide, unless you research Beta releases in the Phillipines and South America, where it was still popular many years after its demise in the US. This is why special orders were still being taken by major producers, and then later on by licensees who would market only in these locations where many beta players still were in widespread use.

The fact that VHS "won" over Beta is the most unbelievable and ridiculous thing that has ever happened in the world of video and electronics. I LOVED BETA!

When did they get out of beta and finally go gold?

Last Sony Beta VCR made was 2002. Might seem surprising but Beta was pretty big in some asian and South American markets through the 1990s. Interestingly, Sony made some of the best VHS machines around in the 1990s and early 2000s.

It's not hard to understand the reasons why Beta didn't take hold in the US if you understand some things about it. It's quite a case study in business management and marketing as well as Japanese culture and manners.

To put it in brief, Sony saw itself as the premier electronics firm in Japan, and still does, and with that mantle comes certain responsibilities and rights in Japanese business culture that we in the US don't see quite the same way, as we have a history of competitive business culture (at least up to that time). In a way, Sony execs felt it was their right to dictate the VCR format due to their prominent position, and the responsibility of others to follow suit. Of all the other electronics firms, only JVC was willing to stand up to Sony's dictums and planned their own VCR format.

At about this same time, RCA execs went to Japan to discuss business matters with Sony regarding marketing Beta machines under the RCA label. RCA had certain things in mind to present, such things as a longer record time, longer than the 1 hour Beta record time. This was a major problem. Sony did not want to lower the quality of Beta recordings by slowing the tape to record 2 or more hours. RCA couldn't understand why not and insisited on it, after all, Americans would want to record movies and sports programs. Sony was offended.

Neither giant would budge. Much of it had to do with temperment and ego. RCA execs left and Sony bid them farewell, thinking they'd come back eventually. RCA went to JVC and were quite pleased that JVC had a system that would record 2 hrs on the fastest speed, with only slightly lesser quality than Beta, 220-240 lines vs 230-250 lines and 4 hrs on the slower speed at a slightly lesser quality, with plans to go to 6 hr speed, and an only slightly larger cassette. And all at a better price.

This is what RCA wanted, so VHS became a staple of the one American electronics firm that knew the American public, and marketing to it, fairly well. At least they did at this time. We all know the eventual result of the Beta-VHS battle. In a fair and competitive open marketplace, the winning format was the one that delivered what the public wanted at a low price.

The quality of Beta 1 vs VHS SP is not up to debate, Beta is technically better. However, the quality of Beta II vs VHS SP, the speed that pre-recorded movies use, is slightly better on VHS. The apparent quality visible to the general public on a 19" or 25" CRT, the common TV sets at the time is not significantly different nor noticable. In such a situation, the lower price and wider availability of VHS machines was the deciding factor in the US. It was not due to any big X-rated VHS tape demand like modern news media "pundits" like to state. I heard such a comment recently by one idiotic local newscaster who took offense when I wote him a letter pointing out his lack of real investigation. He demanded my qualifications to say such things, and when I sent them to him, I never heard back. This fellow now does weather and traffic reports, where no real investigative skills are necessary, since all the information is spoon-fed to the studio by others.

Anyway, in other foreign markets, Sony had a good head start and Beta remained popular as those nations' citizenry could ill afford to toss out one VCR already purchased in favor of another. And RCA did not have the same presence there either.

Had to voodoo this thread back because in my inane searches on things Betamax as of late, I stumbled across what might be the answer to the question of this thread . . .

In 1996, ‘Mission: Impossible’ was the first U.S. feature film to open in more than 3,000 theaters. It was also the last movie by a major studio to be released in the already antiquated Betamax format.

Looks like I need to find that to see what the quality is like

Thats' nuts. I wonder if that is a Japanese release. I feel like they would have stopped US production by that point.

I never noticed this thread before.

I don't know that we'll ever know for sure, not just with Beta but with lots of things. Even LD, which had comparatively few pressing plants compared to VHS tape factories or whatever...still we don't know. Everyone used to say it was Tokyo Raiders, then it was supposed to be the Dragon's Lair bootleg, but now we know that TONS of LaserJuke disks were released for years a years after DL.

The only ones you can be sure about are situations where all the manufacturing was done by the format's license holder, like MiniDisc, video games, stuff like that. I assume Sony wasn't still manufacturing all the Beta by the end so...good luck.

As far as I know, the "Mission Impossible" wasnt released on Beta at all.
I had a Video/LD/Comic mail order company at this time and the movie distributors sent me the new catalogues, they stopped selling new Beta movies around the early 90s. Later titles were educational videos, like "Learning English", release of Blockbusters ended in 1990/91. Mission Impossible was released in 1996, so it really is impossible that they released this title so late.