I believe this is the third Region A release of this film, and each one is still botched in some way. I have the 2009 release, but none of them are definitive, correct?

They also buggered up porting over the old blu-ray extras so they stutter.

"if I would have known this release would have made this many people unhappy, I wish we would have passed this on to the second highest bidder."

"I wish we would have passed this on to the second highest bidder."

"I thought you guys were arguing that it wasn't BLUE enough, all those post of the '98 DVD as comparisons. Now, its too blue, how could I take any of this seriously?"

This was the largest advance we ever paid for studio title and after acquiring the film we found out a few people weren't happy with the color grading of the 4K master, we did what we could to make some needed adjustments and shared the before-and-after captures with the fans months before the release - which was probably a mistake, most loved it and thanked us and others continued on the attacks. We recreated the 162-minute cut, we tried to stay as true to the theatrical cut as possible, replacing wipe edits with cuts and vice versa, reinserting an optical flip edit, adding the original 1967 UA logo and more. But for some reason some people expected us do a new ‘high six-figure’ 4K restoration in Italy. And even if we wanted to do a new transfer, we would need the permission of the Italian rights holder, who hold all the film elements and they already think they have a perfect master supervised and color graded by the film's assistant cameraman.

This film (162-minute cut) is probably one of my top 5 or 10 favorite movies of all time, I could not wait to announce this title and could not believe I was gonna work on one of my all time favorites. But in hindsight, I wish we would’ve fought for the other two titles we ending up losing and left these to the second highest bidder, even though the release will most likely become our biggest seller of all time. These venomous posts which have been piling up for months almost got the best of me a few months ago and today it kind of did after I read pages of these repetitive single-day posts.

Perfect example of another misinformed post. We outbid another company because we were passionate about the film, we spend months creating the edit, fixing what we could fix and added some cool extras, delayed the release twice because of these issues and to get a couple of extras we ended up not getting. Do you even know what it takes to release a 2 disc set loaded with extras? No one had seen the 162 minute THEATRICAL CUT in HD and no one had released it on DVD since the early 2000s.

For all the people canceling their orders, I guess none of you gave a crap about seeing the 162 minute cut again and for the first time in HD. The master was edited from the same 4K master of the 2014 MGM master, with some color correction, we added the original 1967 UA logo, the optical flip sequence and replaced the wipe cuts with actual cuts as they appeared in the theatrical cut.

I believe the theatrical version is available but they didn't want/have the resources to do a full scan/remaster and arbitrarily decided that "first time in HD!" would move units of it so just assembled it out of the 4K restoration of the full version.

This is not inspiring very much confidence for their just-about-to-start multi-release deal for the ABC titles. Why do so many of the people who run the US boutique labels react like this to a controversial/problematic release?

Poor Kino. They are clearly an innocent, passive bystander, caught between the vicious, evil, release......and the "people", (usually referred to as "customers"), who are completely unhappy for unknown reasons.

Am I reading this right, Kino Lorber re-edited the film and inserted artificially created transitions to "recreate" a different (presumably unavailable) version?

Why do so many of the people who run the US boutique labels react like this to a controversial/problematic release?

Wow, they really don't get it, do they?

Am I reading this right, Kino Lorber re-edited the film and inserted artificially created transitions to "recreate" a different (presumably unavailable) version?

Aside from the cost of doing a new scan, new color correction and new digital cleanup of dirt, emulsion digs, etc., all the elements for the U.S. version are a couple of generations down from the original, so they scanned an old I.P. or I.N. of the theatrical cut it would look like crap next to the 4K of the long version.

The edge enhancement on Universal's disc of Barton Fink is disappointing but I still prefer it to Kino's. My copy of Duel in the Sun has already shipped from wowHD but if a UK label does Duel better in the future, I'll buy it for a third time. I'm hoping Kino's disc of Son of Paleface turns out well..

3.5 video quality ratings are so omnipresent.