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Kino have confirmed Misery as one of their October 4K releases (there is another one that should be announcing soon from MGM, and many seem to think it’ll be Carrie).

dustybooks wrote: Thu Jul 15, 2021 3:53 pm Has anyone heard anything about further progress on Rich and Strange and Number Seventeen? They were scheduled a couple of years ago but never appeared.

They were held back to do new scans of materials, then the pandemic slowed that down. Last I saw KLI comment on them they still planned to release them, but needed to regain access to elements.

Ribs wrote: Thu Jul 15, 2021 4:44 pm Kino have confirmed Misery as one of their October 4K releases (there is another one that should be announcing soon from MGM, and many seem to think it’ll be Carrie).

They also said some former Shout Factory titles are in the latest MGM deal, so I gotta think that the 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers is an inevitable UHD release for them.

Odd. I think Scream's Misery Blu-ray is still in-print.

The MGM deal has two former Twilight Time titles.

It’s not, but it’s been available from Clearance sites and stores for a long time and hasn’t risen in price because I think they have too much supply.

But Misery isn't listed on the going OOP section of Shout's site nor does its page have a going OOP date.

To Live and Die in LA could be one of the UHDs.

More OOP based on previously being in the "While Supplies Last" sale and now no longer appearing on the website:

Beggars of Life (1928) (DVD) (BD previously OOP)
Big Business / Scenes from a Mall - Double Feature (1988/1991) (DVD) (BD still available)
Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine (1965) (BD)
Savage Weekend (1979) (BD) (DVD still available)

Silence of the Lambs could be one of the UHDs couldnt it if Criterion has no plans to go 4k?

Highly doubt that would be possible. As I recall, Kino said the deals with MGM include UHD, so those rights would be with Criterion until their license expires.

I just saw they announced Cecil B. De Mille's The Cheat, which I didn't expect but will definitely get. I didn't know De Mille's work beyond his popular sound films and rented Kino's then-new DVD release of The Cheat after reading about it in James Card's Seductive Cinema. It was truly a revelation, and as Card tells it, not only was it a surprise for him, but he had difficulty getting some who were turned off by De Mille's later work to give The Cheat a fair shake because they refused to believe he was capable of far better films.

Regardless, here's an old capsule review by Dave Kehr where writes "the popular image of Cecil B. De Mille as the sanctimonious perpetrator of interminable religious epics couldn't be further from the truth. At his best he was a great storyteller and a brilliant melodramatist in the Belasco tradition, and during his early years his contributions to the growing language of film were rivaled only by D.W. Griffith's."

hearthesilence wrote: Sat Jul 17, 2021 7:13 pm I just saw they announced Cecil B. De Mille's The Cheat, which I didn't expect but will definitely get. I didn't know De Mille's work beyond his popular sound films and rented Kino's then-new DVD release of The Cheat after reading about it in James Card's Seductive Cinema. It was truly a revelation, and as Card tells it, not only was it a surprise for him, but he had difficulty getting some who were turned off by De Mille's later work to give The Cheat a fair shake because they refused to believe he was capable of far better films.

Regardless, here's an old capsule review by Dave Kehr where writes "the popular image of Cecil B. De Mille as the sanctimonious perpetrator of interminable religious epics couldn't be further from the truth. At his best he was a great storyteller and a brilliant melodramatist in the Belasco tradition, and during his early years his contributions to the growing language of film were rivaled only by D.W. Griffith's."

They announced George Abbott's The Cheat (1931) today on Twitter. Are you confusing the announcement or did they announce the De Mille film somewhere else?

Indeed they announced the 1931 The Cheat. It's not a very good film.

captveg wrote: Thu Jul 15, 2021 4:46 pm They also said some former Shout Factory titles are in the latest MGM deal, so I gotta think that the 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers is an inevitable UHD release for them.

You nailed this. They just announced a UHD.

dwk wrote: Sun Jul 18, 2021 3:37 pm

captveg wrote: Thu Jul 15, 2021 4:46 pm They also said some former Shout Factory titles are in the latest MGM deal, so I gotta think that the 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers is an inevitable UHD release for them.

You nailed this. They just announced a UHD.

Yes and no - I guessed the title, but my reasoning was faulty since this was actually from the previous MGM deal and not the new one.

It’s pretty weird after Kino’s extreme hesitance to dive into the 4K race that they’ll be releasing 8 titles in the last quarter of the year (4 from MGM we know 2 of, 4 from Universal we know all of). I am sure the economics have made it more scalable and installation has gone up quite a bit with the new consoles but I find it very exciting to see all these titles start to line up.

Glowingwabbit wrote: Sat Jul 17, 2021 7:28 pm They announced George Abbott's The Cheat (1931) today on Twitter. Are you confusing the announcement or did they announce the De Mille film somewhere else?

Aw hell, apologies. I only saw the picture they posted on FB of the vintage advertisement that says The Cheat and mistakenly thought they were upgrading their old DVD.

Ribs wrote:It’s pretty weird after Kino’s extreme hesitance to dive into the 4K race that they’ll be releasing 8 titles in the last quarter of the year (4 from MGM we know 2 of, 4 from Universal we know all of). I am sure the economics have made it more scalable and installation has gone up quite a bit with the new consoles but I find it very exciting to see all these titles start to line up.

I might be wrong but I highly doubt the new consoles are going to generate a huge increase in UHD discs sales.

My anecdotal experience is that most people are buying the versions of the new consoles without the disc drives since they are less expensive.

More OOP based on previously being in the "While Supplies Last" sale and now no longer appearing on the website:

They're Playing with Fire (1984) (DVD) (BD previously OOP)

The PS5 all digital version seems a lot harder to get your hands on but I don’t know if that’s because there’s more demand for it or less supply of it. The price difference is about $100 and the only difference is the disc drive, which probably costs Sony about $10 or $20, so I imagine they’re taking a smaller upfront hit on sales of the disc drive version (although they could be losing money longer term because of used game sales) so I wouldn’t be shocked if the physical edition makes up the lion’s share of consoles shipped and sales, but I don’t think there are hard numbers out for it.

Series X and S are of course different machines under the hood and the supply issue there is different because Microsoft is diverting quantities of Series X silicon to the data centre instead of releasing it to consumers - Microsoft are also more all-in on digital service subscriptions so have more of an interest in selling people the console with no drive.

In any case it isn’t a one-to-one relationship like the PS3 and Blu-ray drives were when that launched. I’m sure there were more Xbox One S (which was highly inexpensive) and Xbox One X systems in the wild by 2020 than there currently are PS5 and Xbox Series X. They both had UHD Blu-ray drives, but did that have any discernible impact on UHD film sales?

I read discussions about this on blu-ray.com (where some people are seemingly just convinced it's a matter of time before the market's share of UHDs skyrocket) and IIRC, based on the current sales figures, it looks as if less than 1% of UHD-capable-consoles buyers are indeed using them as UHD-players.
So no.
Which shouldn't come as a surprise since PS3 didnt get Blu-ray a massive adoption rate already

Um, I am not entirely sure why every time this extremely blatant fact comes up everyone jumps down the throat to dismiss it as totally insane. Let’s say only 1% of the people who buy the consoles are willing to use them as UHD players (which is obviously a lowball and not relevant to the entire point about install bases) - that’s still about 150,000 more people buying UHDs then were a year ago. I don’t understand how the fact that the amount of players in homes across the world has increased tenfold could possibly be so routinely dismissed as not a factor in the development of the format - just because the remaining 13 million people or whatever who have the new consoles aren’t using them for these discs doesn’t mean they aren’t willing to or won’t ever be able to, and being able to tap into that audience is huge compared to what existed beforehand.

dwk wrote: Tue Dec 22, 2020 8:34 pm Baxter is one of the recent Scorpion/KLSC StudioCanal pick ups

Mondo Digital.

Surely Tenia's merely pointing out that exactly the same rose-tinted predictions were made about Blu-ray a decade ago and they generally didn't come to pass? And that was without the competition posed by streaming services, whereby 4K versions of films are available for a fraction of the price of the physical-media alternatives (and most people simply don't care about the bitrate-related differences).

Obviously a bigger user base isn't going to hurt, but I'd honestly steer clear of hyperbolic adjectives like "huge" unless actual sales figures start to justify it. And I'm not seeing that happening right now.

Anecdotally, I'm possibly the only person I know IRL who's getting into UHD right now. It kind of feels like we're going full circle where the UHD market may be the LaserDisc market prior to DVD. Again, all anecdotal, but I knew very few families who had VHS collections of films beyond children's or Disney videos. Everyone owned a VCR, but it was nearly exclusively for rentals and homemade videos. The very few diehard cinephiles I knew out there invested in LaserDisc which was easily the best (and most expensive) format. It wasn't until the DVD boom that ownership of movies really blew up, to the point where owning a modest collection of DVD's was almost as ubiquitous as owning CD's. I don't think we'll ever see the likes of that level of ownership again now that the quality of streaming is more than adequate for most people. I've said this elsewhere, but most people I know invest a lot in their TV's, both in money and the time researching what to buy, and it's incredible and illogical how they won't move beyond streaming. I don't mean just Netflix, it's pretty stunning how many of them torrent movies, like a shitload of movies, and often times they're in terrible quality, typically from pirated DVD screeners. You can invest all the money in the world in your system, but it's not better than garbage if that's the picture quality of what you're watching.

I'm glad UHD is taking off to a modest degree and I'm definitely buying into it, but I don't see it being much more than a niche market. I don't think that's a terrible outlook either as LaserDisc did more than fine as a niche market.