Apple Adds Lionsgate, Earns My Business

Despite the fact that I eagerly await weekly installments of “The Office” on iTunes, I’ve never sampled from Apple’s growing movie collection. Today that is going to change. OK, it just changed right now, after I wrote that sentence, because Apple added Lionsgate movies, and L.A. Story is available for $9.99.

The 1991 comedy stars Steve Martin as a hapless weatherman whose life changes with the cryptic advice of a electronic highway road sign. It is a brilliantly unambitious film. Somewhere in my dad’s storage lockers it exists on VHS, but now (ugh…three hours from now, at this rate), it will live on my computer.

Other films that are part of the deal include Terminator 2, The Blair Witch Project, and Dirty Dancing, though they do not appear to be available at the moment. The arrangement includes 150 titles, bringing iTunes’ total movie inventory to 400 titles, including existing offerings from Paramount and Disney.

Apple’s latest figures report iTunes has sold over two billion songs, 50 million TV shows, and over 1.3 million movies.

136.7 MB of 1.08 GB, three hours remaining. Guess I won’t be ditching work to watch Steve Martin just yet.