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FrauBlucher wrote: Tue May 11, 2021 3:17 pm No official announcement but popping up on Amazon...
3 for June so far...

Ziegfeild Follies

Looks like their next priority is updating that first musicals DVD box, so I imagine Till the Clouds Roll By and Three Little Words will come in due time as well.

As for the Mankiewicz film, well, it's not good, so of course they're releasing it. Wish they'd release his Julius Caesar instead

It's tragic how many Mank films are with Fox and buried. Sleuth needs a release so bad.

Anyways, yeah, this late-Mank is one of his very worst.

Sleuth is tied up in the same problem as Stepford Wives and Heartbreak Kid where the remake rights conflated the current owners’ sense of what they can ask and therefore no label can afford a release

There's an Australian DVD release of Sleuth that was released as recently as 2015. I presume Bristol Myers Squibb own it worldwide, so I wonder how much Umbrella coughed up for it.

Jesus, don't they make enough money from the pharmaceutical racket? Even the most reasonably optimistic price is probably a fraction of what they'd make in a single day peddling just one of their drugs.

That is part of the problem. What the films are actually worth is not enough for them to bother. It is a similar issue with A Better Tomorrow and A Better Tomorrow 2. The rights outside HK are owned by a real estate company and they just will not earn enough money for them to bother licensing them out.

FrauBlucher wrote: Tue May 11, 2021 3:17 pm Ziegfeld Follies

I can never tell these three films apart. This is the third one from 1945 and is a revue, as opposed to The Great Ziegfeld (1936) and Ziegfeld Girl (1941). And both of the '40s ones are "the one with Judy Garland."

hearthesilence wrote: Tue May 11, 2021 5:30 pm Jesus, don't they make enough money from the pharmaceutical racket? Even the most reasonably optimistic price is probably a fraction of what they'd make in a single day peddling just one of their drugs.

dwk wrote: Tue May 11, 2021 5:37 pm The rights outside HK are owned by a real estate company and they just will not earn enough money for them to bother licensing them out.

Any money they'd make from licensing the films is more than they'd make by holding on to them...

Yes, but they factor in the time and legal fees involved in licensing out the films and come to the conclusion that it just isn't worth it.

Just when things couldn't get more puzzling AT&T is spinning off Warner Media with Discovery. Here What does this mean for the Warner catalogue? Maybe we have to wait for the dust to settle

FrauBlucher wrote: Mon May 17, 2021 7:12 pm Just when things couldn't get more puzzling AT&T is spinning off Warner Media with Discovery. Here What does this mean for the Warner catalogue? Maybe we have to wait for the dust to settle

Full story from Indiewire

If this means I get Warner Bros. films AND 90 Day Fiance all in one place...

90 Day Fiance sounds like a Cary Grant screwball comedy anyway

FrauBlucher wrote: Tue May 11, 2021 3:17 pm No official announcement but popping up on Amazon...
3 for June so far...

Ziegfeild Follies
Guns for San Sebastian
There Was a Crooked Man

Three more revealed via Amazon:

Chain Lightning (1950)
It Happened at the World's Fair (1963)
Madame Curie (1943)

Madame Curie is superb Hollywood hokum. No one expecting an accurate biography should apply, but it's an extremely well-done romantic comedy of sorts

[]

"They Won´t Believe Me" (1947) has been restored to original length. Go here and scroll down for details on reinstated material:
https://trailersfromhell.com/they-wont-believe-me/

Interesting comment re: "Till The Clouds Roll By" (1946; my italics):
"Warner rescued Till The Clouds Roll By from PD hell at least a decade ago and continue to hold onto those rights with renewals, hence the inclusion of the Show Boat opener on this Blu (=reference to one of the bonus features on the recent WAC blu of Show Boat, 1951). The TTCRB Show Boat prologue was, frankly, a revelation, as I was suspecting it would merely be a slapped together montage from the tired old DVD scan. It's not. It's a new scan in HD and looks utterly magnificent. It seems a terrible waste for WAC to go to that trouble to scan in a prologue and NOT actually have remastered the rest of the movie too in HD for a pending new-to-Blu release."
Source: https://www.hometheaterforum.com/commun ... ew.371067/

Unfortunately no news on physical media...Hollywood Reporter
Get used to seeing this...

Ironic name, given that this merger is likely going to lead to even less "discovery" of the Warners back catalog by the relatively uninitiated.

I hate "rebranding." I don't know how much a new name matters after a merger, but they could just go back to calling it Warner Bros. They've got a classic, timeless name already in its history, reclaim it as is.

“Discovery Bros.” would’ve had a nice ring to it.

If they ever want to scale back their operations to weekday afternoon PBS shows, Discovery Bros. would be perfect.

That just makes me think of The Leyland Brothers.

I hope their new logo swooshes onto screen like the Christopher Reeve Superman film titles.

Amazon is going to still keep putting out however many of the blus left but after saying some of the MOD DVDs were "available in 3 to 4 months" then to "temporarily out of stock," they are mostly all "no longer available from this seller." Were they going to do their own burning and decided not to? Are these discs dead-dead? They should still be available from other retailers but I expect that's all the extant stock there is.

teddyleevin wrote: Wed Jun 09, 2021 3:28 am Amazon is going to still keep putting out however many of the blus left but after saying some of the MOD DVDs were "available in 3 to 4 months" then to "temporarily out of stock," they are mostly all "no longer available from this seller." Were they going to do their own burning and decided not to? Are these discs dead-dead? They should still be available from other retailers but I expect that's all the extant stock there is.

I’m pretty sure Amazon just has a “storefront” for the Warner Archive products they were already selling, which WB kind of presented as a replacement for the recently-shuttered version of wbshop.com, which was also run by a third party. (I think the new version of that site is run by a different third party, it just seems to be more merchandise-oriented and doesn’t sell Warner Archive releases.)

I doubt having Amazon produce the discs was ever the plan — didn’t Amazon recently announce that they’re discontinuing their MOD disc operations entirely? I guess it’s possible that Warner is not going to produce any more stock of their WAC releases, but it seems more likely to me that they’re simply between runs on a lot of titles. As I understand it, the WAC blu ray releases are “MOD” in the sense that they’re pressed in very small batches. I know disc production has been struggling all over the place lately, so I wouldn’t be surprised if Amazon is simply sold out of a lot of titles and it may take longer than usual for more to get pressed, since supply seems to be running short of demand on less-niche titles too. (Then again, I don’t know if the manufacturer they use for those small WAC runs is one that also deals with bigger releases, so problems seen elsewhere may not have any direct bearing here.)

Out of curiosity, what are some titles that are “no longer available from this seller”?