Donnie Darko

Discuss releases from Arrow and the films on them.

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Cronenfly
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Re: Donnie Darko

#51 Post by Cronenfly » Fri Jan 13, 2017 12:32 pm

I believe this is still with Fox in the US as well, so perhaps different rights holders in the two territories would have necessitated region-locking no matter what?

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domino harvey
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Re: Donnie Darko

#52 Post by domino harvey » Fri Jan 13, 2017 12:35 pm

How hard would it have been to say something even noncommittal along the lines of "US fans, stay tuned for more news about the potential for stateside release"?

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tenia
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Re: Donnie Darko

#53 Post by tenia » Fri Jan 13, 2017 12:42 pm

domino harvey wrote:How hard would it have been to say something even noncommittal along the lines of "US fans, stay tuned for more news about the potential for stateside release"?
And if the deal don't go through, having to cope with the usual internet whining "what a disappointment to tease us like this and finally not releasing it. And now, the UK LE is OOP ! Screw you Arrow, won't be buying from you anymore, I wish you were dead, I want to kill myself now." ?

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Re: Donnie Darko

#54 Post by domino harvey » Fri Jan 13, 2017 12:45 pm

The difference is one informs the customer, the other doesn't. Hell, okay, why not delay the UK release for a few weeks til they could simultaneously announce a future US release? Arrow has had no problem delaying releases in the past

Any way you cut it, announcing mere weeks after releasing a limited edition "UK only" release that an identical version will also be available in the US is just poor planning/execution

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Re: Donnie Darko

#55 Post by swo17 » Fri Jan 13, 2017 12:49 pm

Well there could have been legitimate complaints if they had hinted that a US release would be coming, the UK release sold out, and then the US release didn't materialize. Though of course, this could have been prevented by delaying the UK release, as domino suggests.

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tenia
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Re: Donnie Darko

#56 Post by tenia » Fri Jan 13, 2017 12:53 pm

The delay probably would have been the more sensitive thing. As long as they don't announce a date, no external person knows anyway the precise date : it was Dec 13th but it could be Feb 20th for all we know and we would be stuck with this date anyway (like with how long it took for the Phantasm set to finally materialise).

All I'm saying is that there might have been very practical reasons dictating this situation, like maybe the US deal was extremely bumpy ? Maybe it originally was unlikely or very long to get done, and something suddenly got unblocked ?

In the end, you're right : silly stupid organisation issues happen in every company for pointless reasons, and the end customer is getting the short end of the stick in the end. But I tend to believe that if a better less customer-annoying situation could have been found, it would have been used.

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Re: Donnie Darko

#57 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Sat Jan 14, 2017 8:16 pm


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Re: Donnie Darko

#58 Post by MichaelB » Sun Jan 15, 2017 9:02 am

tenia wrote:But I tend to believe that if a better less customer-annoying situation could have been found, it would have been used.
I don't know the ins and outs of this particular situation, but you are of course entirely correct as a general rule. Although people always love a good conspiracy theory, labels don't actually go out of their way to annoy their customers (what would be the point?), and there's invariably a very straightforward explanation.

In this case, I suspect Arrow simply didn't know how long it would take to clear the US rights (or indeed whether this would be possible at all), didn't fancy wasting valuable licensing time (and pre-Christmas sales, a major consideration) gambling that it would only take weeks rather than months (or years), and were then surprised when the US rights situation was resolved right at the start of 2017. I'm pretty certain that the US edition of Donnie Darko was a very late addition to an already packed April roster, and I suspect it was the final confirmation of the US rights clearance that triggered it - after all, all the artwork etc. already existed, so it would only have taken a couple of hours to mock up the necessary visuals in US-appropriate form.

All the above is guesswork on my part (as a freelancer, I'm simply not in the relevant loops), but it explains pretty much everything. Swo17 is entirely correct to say that there's no point announcing a US release until you're 100% certain that such a thing is contractually viable - and if you lack this certainty, what can you usefully say?

I can also confirm, seeing that someone brought up Hellraiser, that while the original UK version was under development it seemed very unlikely that the box would ever be releasable in the US, so this simply wasn't considered as a possibility at the time. It only became a possibility during 2016 - but even then these things don't translate into immediate certainties because the US rights for every other element of the package have to be cleared as well. And sometimes they can't be: for instance, Arrow reluctantly had to drop two short films from the US editions of The Beast and Immoral Tales (originally conceived as UK-only releases), but made up the shortfall by porting over other extras from the Borowczyk discs that are likely to remain UK-only. This created a fair bit of unwanted extra work at Arrow's end - believe you me, they'd much rather have simply cloned the UK discs, merely dropping the original region-locking!

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Re: Donnie Darko

#59 Post by domino harvey » Thu Mar 02, 2017 12:15 am

MisterLime claims Kino was offered and turned down Donnie Darko

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Re: Donnie Darko

#60 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Wed Mar 08, 2017 11:52 am

So does Fox still own this?

ianungstad
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Re: Donnie Darko

#61 Post by ianungstad » Wed Mar 08, 2017 12:43 pm

No. AMBI Group.

They have Nolan's Memento as well which has been out of print for awhile. I kind of expected that to wind up at Criterion but with Arrow releasing Donnie Darko; who knows.

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Re: Donnie Darko

#62 Post by rapta » Wed Mar 08, 2017 1:07 pm

ianungstad wrote:No. AMBI Group.

They have Nolan's Memento as well which has been out of print for awhile. I kind of expected that to wind up at Criterion but with Arrow releasing Donnie Darko; who knows.
That would be another excellent film from that era for Arrow to tackle. Still one of Nolan's best (if not his very best) and Guy Pearce is terrific (as is Joe Pantoliano). The US Lionsgate transfer seems to be pretty good, so if they can't license that I'm sure they'd end up doing their own scan. It's with Pathé/Fox in the UK so dunno how likely or unlikely it could be licensed for at least a UK release.

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Re: Donnie Darko

#63 Post by JamesF » Tue Mar 14, 2017 12:52 pm

AMBI also have international (i.e. non-UK) rights to Philip Ridley's The Passion Of Darkly Noon, which is crying out for an HD release somewhere, anywhere!

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Re: Donnie Darko

#64 Post by therewillbeblus » Mon Aug 24, 2020 10:01 am

zedz wrote:
Tue Dec 27, 2016 11:19 pm
I read it as a portrait of an emotionally disturbed teen, whose greatest fear is to die alone, who, in the moment when he does in fact die alone, in a completely senseless way, imagines a convoluted narrative which not only gives him the experience of companionship, but transforms his meaningless death into a necessary sacrifice. This seemed to me a pretty ingenious way to lend emotional heft to the standard "it was all a dream" trope, and accounted for why the film seemed to be so good at delineating emotional relationships but so ramshackle in its plotting and world-building. It was genuinely unthinkable to me that we were actually supposed to take all that jerry-rigged sci-fi nonsense seriously, but that seems to be what Kelly was intending.
I always leaned towards the "sci-fi nonsense" interpretation myself but I had only seen this as a kid until now, a long gap that surely would have been longer if not for our sci-fi project. On a revisit I completely agree with this reading of wish-fulfillment, a mentally-imbalanced teenager with an active imagination concocting a preferred narrative for himself in a moment of transcendence. Many interactions within the story I had previously viewed as just weird-for-the-sake-of-weird would make sense under this idea, like Barrymore's inappropriate welcoming to Malone by telling her to sit next to the boy she thinks is the cutest, or even Donnie being the last person in her classroom asking what message he should send to the rest of the class, Malone referring to his name as that of a superhero, his self-actualizations telling all the phonies in his life to fuck themselves (and exploiting one person in particular for being a vessel of harm), being needed by Malone when her mom leaves, etc. with the final "what was his name?" validation of worth from Malone post-mortem being the kind of marker of catharsis all an insecure teenage boy is really seeking.

I honestly haven't had the interest to look into what Kelly intended for the film since I never liked it enough to engage with the theorizing beyond passive participation walking into discussions that friends who did love the film were already having. It's disappointing to hear that he took this idea literally, as I agree that recontextualizing the "it was all a dream" cop-out into a defense mechanism to cope with existential regret is far more interesting. Under that concept, the act of granting an English class lesson's abstraction like "cellar door" tangibility is quite amusing.

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Re: Donnie Darko

#65 Post by zedz » Mon Aug 24, 2020 4:40 pm

I find it hard to revisit the film knowing that what I most liked about it was a 'misreading', and I have little interest in Kelly's intended version. Also, I believe that the available versions substitute INXS for Echo & the Bunnymen at the beginning of the film, which is a trade down I'd rather avoid experiencing.

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Re: Donnie Darko

#66 Post by therewillbeblus » Mon Aug 24, 2020 4:55 pm

I had bought the Arrow on its release simply because the package was so stacked, but I don't know if I'll ever be able to rationalize going through the supplements considering my ambivalence towards the film. I started the Director's Cut last night but switched over to the theatrical only minutes in, after reading many comments here slamming it. I actually still like aspects of the theatrical cut, but its abnormality never felt earned until I read your own interpretation. As far as I'm concerned, that's now the correct reading, which is my preferred subjective narrative (take that, Kelly).

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knives
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Re: Donnie Darko

#67 Post by knives » Mon Aug 24, 2020 5:16 pm

Kelly's been pretty adamant that he doesn't view the director's cut as better, just different.

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therewillbeblus
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Re: Donnie Darko

#68 Post by therewillbeblus » Mon Aug 24, 2020 6:15 pm

Yeah he's called it just a different edit or something. I don't even know what the differences are, but I don't think it matters to how he views his story or themes? Like it's not a case where one is a dream and one is a literal sci-fi..

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Re: Donnie Darko

#69 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Mon Aug 24, 2020 7:19 pm

The most noticeable thing about it are some SFX shots which felt like they belonged in a more expensive movie. I like that INXS song but didn't buy it as the opening song of this. Kelly wanted to use U2's "MLK" over the scene where "Mad World" is, which I find a little more preposterous.

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Re: Donnie Darko

#70 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Tue Oct 20, 2020 1:03 pm

I watched the theatrical version last night, and it holds up much better as a character piece and with the idea that the more fanciful aspects are all within his head. For me this is better to take in at face value than think about those aspects too much, otherwise you'd forget things like the Tears for Fears sequence or the hilarious moments like the cut to the principal's office or Donnie calling Jim Cunningham a "fucking psychopath". If Kelly did a third version adding all of the extra character stuff and leaving everything else out I'd be up for it.

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Re: Donnie Darko

#71 Post by DarkImbecile » Fri Jan 29, 2021 12:17 pm


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yoloswegmaster
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Re: Donnie Darko

#72 Post by yoloswegmaster » Fri Apr 23, 2021 9:00 am

A couple people have reported that there are some stuttering issues on the 4K version of the theatrical cut.

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Adam X
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Re: Donnie Darko

#73 Post by Adam X » Wed Apr 28, 2021 7:22 am

Last edited by Adam X on Mon Jun 14, 2021 10:37 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Donnie Darko

#74 Post by mfunk9786 » Mon Jun 14, 2021 10:06 am

Has anyone heard from Arrow on these replacements? I entered for it but got no follow-up e-mail or anything, beginning to wonder when it's actually happening since they had mentioned mid-June. I guess I'll know soon enough.

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Adam X
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Re: Donnie Darko

#75 Post by Adam X » Mon Jun 14, 2021 10:43 am

Not personally, though looking at their announcement again, they said “that discs will not be shipping until at least mid-June”, so at the earliest.

When I contacted them about the Demons replacement disc, I heard nothing until they were ready to ship the disc. Not ideal, but better than no communication at all, I guess.

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