AidanKing wrote: ↑Fri Jan 15, 2021 3:01 pm
Andrei Konchalovsky's
Dear Comrades!,
positively reviewed by Michael B, appears to be another streaming-only release.
I did contact Curzon Artificial Eye a while ago to inquire about the new direction and was advised, in a very considered and polite response to be fair, that whether a film would get a physical media release was entirely based on how many sales the company could project and that this approach was the result of the year on year decline in sales of DVDs and BluRays. They said they are still looking to release special editions when they feel it would be viable to do so, for example,
Summer of 85 may be included in an Ozon Blu Ray set later this year.
Quite a few Curzon films have turned up on Netflix, for example,
At Eternity's Gate,
Vox Lux and
The Whistlers, but not everything the company has released recently, so no
Transit or
Young Ahmed.
A shame to hear that, but it seemed pretty obvious they've been handling releases in this way for a while. In fact I noticed they would often release films with 'big name actors' on Blu-ray (At Eternity's Gate, Loro, Vox Lux, Gloria Bell), and DVD or streaming only for films they clearly decided had less 'commercial appeal' but had done quite well at festivals (So Long My Son, The Whistlers) or were directed by renowned directors (Birds of Passage, Sunset, Transit, Non-Fiction, Guest of Honour). There were the odd anomalies and I hoped things would pick up once Cohen Media took over proceedings, but sounds like it's getting worse. They didn't even bother to assemble any extras for the Bong Joon-ho double-bill, which is frustrating when they're competing with labels like Criterion in a global sense.
Still, at least some of the harder-to-see titles I might've not been able to see at the cinema will be on Netflix, something most of us have access to. I just wish we'd see them translate some titles to Blu-ray - not just upgrades of many of their older DVD titles, but titles like Transit, Sunset and Birds of Passage would've benefitted from the HD presentation (I would've bought all three, Transit especially). I guess the only hope is they pick up more titles by some of those directors and release a small box set eventually, but that'd presumably be a long wait for not much (especially if they aren't producing new extras anymore).