Slightly bad news for us UK folk in regards to Warner Bros titles. HMV's Premium Collection titles for March have just been announced as
McCabe & Mrs. Miller and
Badlands, so good luck waiting to see if Warner Bros will allow Criterion to license those two.
Someone at Blu-ray.com did already point out how Indicator were able to release Jason and the Argonauts after a Premium Collection release (retailer 'exclusive'), but they were only allowed to port the exact same discs and not do their own encode. Also, that was Sony and this is Warner Bros, who are notoriously slippery when it comes to sub-licensing (here in the UK, the label that will probably know this best are BFI).
I reckon this is a good sign that
My Own Private Idaho won't be far off either, but hopefully the remaining Warner Bros titles from the Criterion library will be ported over, since they don't have regular barebones catalogue releases anywhere else (yet). I'm hoping
Blow-Up is niche enough for WB to grant Criterion the UK rights, but we'll have to wait and see about things like
Barry Lyndon and
Being There, both of which have been released in the UK before (and WB could just re-release the old discs for both, as an easy cash-in).
Of course, this could be Warner Bros way of saying "wait a minute, we could easily make a few quid off these titles ourselves", and hopefully these HMV 'exclusives' aren't indefinitely so. In other words, we might still see the Criterion editions released over here, but probably not 'til next year at the earliest.
McCrutchy wrote:rapta wrote:As has been speculated elsewhere though, you would think they would announce it at the same time as the US, as they have been doing for most new restorations where they have the rights in both territories (generally Sony/Janus titles, but not always). In fact, the same month they announced The Silence of the Lambs for North America, here in the UK we got Something Wild instead - obviously still top-tier Demme, but not the blockbuster hit some of us were expecting to be announced.
The very fact they didn't announce it leads me to believe another UK label managed to grab it just before them. My guess is Arrow Video (I'd be pretty surprised if it was anyone else).
Exactly. Many people seem to believe Criterion UK releases titles "at random", because the majority of the releases so far have been titles that were released in the US before April 2016, when Criterion released its first UK titles. In point of fact, since April 2016, some twenty Criterion new releases issued in the UK have almost always come within a month of release in the US, with (as far as I can see) only two titles being delayed: One was
Carnival of Souls, which was released in July 2016 in the US, and not released in the UK until October 2017, and the other was the box set of the
Lone Wolf & Cub films, which was released in November 2016 in the US and March 2017 in the UK. This also includes the forthcoming concurrent UK releases of
Night of the Living Dead in February,
The Age of Innocence in March and
The Awful Truth in April.
Now, maybe there is some other grand scheme at play, and Criterion UK are withholding a major title--possibly their biggest title since launching in the country--from the UK for other reasons, like a month in the US where they don't have a new title to release, but I still believe that if they had the ability to release the film in February 2018, it would be released in February 2018.
Yes, and seeing as they've announced a couple of other MGM titles for the UK since then, it's pretty clear to me they don't have the rights. Or at least they're struggling to acquire them, which isn't often the case with MGM or Fox, who are notoriously simple to deal with licensing-wise, which would indicate that another party is either outbidding them for it or already has it (most likely the latter). I still reckon it's Arrow Video, but it'd be a pleasant surprise to see if either MoC or Indicator could have snapped up a title this big (or perhaps even BFI, who are handling the theatrical re-release).