And for classic movie lovers who mourn the loss of FilmStruck, Warner Bros. CEO Ann Sarnoff said the service will offer a rich library of films from the Warner Bros. and MGM catalog, curated titles from Turner Classic Movies, as well as “decades and decades of more great titles from The Criterion Collection.”
I think this is great if true. Like when Criterion was on Hulu, this will result in far more people seeing these movies and creating new cinephiles who wouldn’t know about or know they’d like a dedicated Criterion streaming service. I think Warners is the first Netflix competitor that really seems to be thinking about how best to compete: by serving everyone with everything
Would a partnership with HBO have any potential wishful-thinking impact on a release of They All Laughed since they distributed the dvd, or does Bogdanovich himself still hold the rights?
I'm pretty sure all of the HBO DVDs are with Warners-- they've released some on their Archives label and a few years back they were selling all the old stock pressed DVDs for super cheap
This isn't until May 2020, and we have no idea how much of the Criterion library is going to be on the HBO service. I would go with the service that Criterion is running rather than gamble on what Warners decides to do (could be Filmstruck 2.0 within a matter of months), but that's just me.
Apologies, I didn't mean to give off the impression of being impulsive. I love the Criterion Channel and it would take a lot for me to cancel it. In other words, I'm with you in the 'wait and see' camp.
No worries, sorry if I seemed scoldy about that. I'm not feeling quite as enthusiastic about this merely because that presser for HBO Max was really pushing content as hard as they possibly could (to the... ah, nevermind) and it almost reads to me as though "The Criterion Collection" is some sort of selling point moreso than a promise that a good deal of the collection will be available. Also, if it is available, will they have full editions for many films the way the Criterion Channel does? I doubt it. Domino is right when he says that more eyeballs are always a good thing, but this sounds as though it's just a case of some of the films that also appear in the collection are going to be on this service, and perhaps HBO will even be competing with Criterion Channel over some streaming rights. Best case scenario will be that Criterion Channel is an add-on, but I doubt it.
$14.99 is already on the higher end of streaming services in general, and while I pay for HBO at the moment, it's definitely a subscription I've cancelled during more dry periods for watching their content (when usually I'm not as attuned to such things when a service is, say, $5.99). Keeping it at $14.99 is a smart move, just because it may have been biting off more than they could chew to up it any higher. HBO alone isn't exactly the premium product it once was with regard to programming quality.
