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Home Cinema Choice's interview with Jonathan Turell was posted to their website

The three most interesting parts of the interview:
He mentioned that their current licensors have been very "supportive" of the move and that "the first reactions from our licensors have been very positive." (which sounds like they might be releasing some non-Sony and non-Janus titles.)

He said "maybe" to UK exclusives, but "Based on sheer size alone, we need the size of the US market in addition to the UK to amortize the costs of production."

When asked if they will continue to license masters and or supplemental material to UK labels like MoC/Eureka or Arrow:

We've worked with all of these companies and they have issued many wonderful editions. That said, what we do is very time-consuming and expensive and we've never really made an effort to license the material we produce. We have done it, both as a favour to our licensors and to the talent we've worked with so that these materials can be seen in other markets. But with our ability to publish directly in the UK, I don't imagine we will license as much as we have in the past. That said, we never say never…

Of course that would allow them to release directly their own stuff in the UK instead of licencing them. It's probably much more financially interesting that way.

Yeah, it certainly makes sense that Criterion would want to release the Apu Trilogy and A Brighter Summer Day themselves, as licensing the master to a UK company wouldn't recoup much of the restoration cost. But the answer struck me in relation to Kevin from Eureka saying at the Blu-ray forum's that they would like to Blu-ray upgrade House and Kwaidan but Criterion will not license them their HD masters (currently the only HD masters for these two films) and I'm wondering if Criterion's plan, going forward, is to wait until Eureka/MoC's (and other UK labels) rights to these expire and then snap up them up.

But I would think they might want to trade off some of the titles they restored for the titles restored by Eureka Video, like The Passion of Joan of Arc so they can release their restoration in US.

Ashirg wrote:But I would think they might want to trade off some of the titles they restored for the titles restored by Eureka Video, like The Passion of Joan of Arc so they can release their restoration in US.

I thought Criterion were associated with the rival restoration, or was that not actually confirmed?

I believe it's done 100% by Gaumont.

If I'm interpreting the Amazon UK page correctly (and if it's to be trusted) then Gilda, Here Comes Mr. Jordan and Overlord are the remaining June releases.

... as well as Burroughs: The Movie and Dr. Strangelove in July.

I really hope they start churning them out at a more rapid pace. Two or three a month means getting a substantial amount of them will take forever - especially if they prioritize films like Dr. Strangelove (it's probably the most boring film they could've chosen in terms of it already being widely available).

July Uk releases will be Burroughs The Movie and Dr Strangelove. No exact release date yet. Communication was done by email press releases.

When will they be announcing the August titles?

Amazon UK has Don't Look Back and The In-Laws listed as the August titles.

The In-Laws is pretty big as it means that Warner Brothers titles are on the table for the UK. Or does someone else have the UK right to it?

IMDb has The In-Laws' UK theatrical release coming from "Columbia-EMI-Warner".

That was a now-defunct theatrical distributor that essentially pooled resources - UIP did something similar for Paramount, Universal, United Artists and MGM (and possibly others; I forget the exact make-up). Which was very handy when booking double and triple bills, as it would mean that I could mix and match titles from multiple Hollywood studios and would only have to go through one booking process.

But the crucial point is that The In-Laws was produced by Warner Bros in the first place, so they'd own the global rights. And I can't imagine anyone else would have taken over the UK rights in the meantime.

MichaelB wrote:But the crucial point is that The In-Laws was produced by Warner Bros in the first place, so they'd own the global rights. And I can't imagine anyone else would have taken over the UK rights in the meantime.

It's a brave new world for Warners. And we're all better for it.

dwk wrote:The In-Laws is pretty big as it means that Warner Brothers titles are on the table for the UK. Or does someone else have the UK right to it?

I hope it means we'll also get McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Badlands, My Own Private Idaho, Day for Night and The New World. Hopefully some more Altman too (though I heard The Player wasn't licensed from WB, or was it?).

The Player was licensed from its original production company, Avenue Pictures.

The New World, My Own Private Idaho and most other New Line Cinema titles are still distributed by Entertainment in Video in the UK, or at least those discs seem to be in print and have not been re-issued by Warner. I don't think Criterion could get their hands on New Line titles until EiV deal runs out.

EiV can do one. Waste of spacers.

I don't know too much about Entertainment in Video's policy during the early DVD period but the thing that always annoyed me with their releases (and one of the many things that first inspired me to begin finding it necessary to import US DVDs in the early 2000s) was the way that they seemed to have a blanket policy of only including one commentary track on their releases even when a US disc featured multiple tracks, and even if other commentaries got mentioned on the single commentary they kept on their release! Unfortunately they distributed lots of the New Line films, who were a company in the early DVD era who regularly produced region 1 discs with multiple commentary tracks (sometimes up to three!) and isolated scores which all got dropped on the UK EiV releases. Usually any bespoke animated menus on the US disc got replaced by static screens too.

I remember something like the four commentary tracks on Se7en, or the three tracks on The Cell got cut down to just the director's commentary. And any extra feature that could not fit on a single disc was usually dropped. Plus when New Line tried that 'Infinifilm' project (which didn't last long but I treasure the Infinifilm release of that Cuban missile crisis film Thirteen Days for all its fascinating historical extras) that didn't translate very well at all to EiV's approach.

The one telling exception to the rule appeared to be the Lord of the Ring films which came to the UK pretty much intact, both in the theatrical and extended four disc editions that EiV put out. Perhaps they were too important to tamper with!

They were also the pioneers of the poorly chosen film still + cheap looking text as cover art. No care whatsoever, I've always detested them.

colinr0380 wrote:which didn't last long but I treasure the Infinifilm release of that Cuban missile crisis film Thirteen Days for all its fascinating historical extras

Right! I actually liked the idea behind that line but only Thirteen Days translated well. Other ones like Blow and I think Fifteen Minutes didn't translate well (of course, the latter was an absolute piece of shit, so that probably didn't help).

In Canada we had Alliance/Atlantis for New Line (along with Miramax and Focus Features) films and as much as I disliked the company (their in-house DVDs and eventually Blu-rays were horseshit with terrible transfers and/or heavily cropped images and/or hearing impaired subtitles for foreign films), at least I think they carried everything over from the American counterparts, at least their studio films, and were usually just straight ports. I probably would have flipped if they pulled the same crap this EiV did. In some cases they would drop a DTS track to make room for a French track for bilingual reasons, which annoyed me. I think I imported Eternal Sunshine... for that reason. I think Entertainment One bought them out so don't know what's happened since.

Here's all the movies released via Infinifilm... I think you only remembered those titles for a reason!

This perhaps shows just how bad my 'to watch' pile is, but I've got the Infinifilm edition of Blow somewhere, as yet unopened! One day...!

(...I'll be found dead under a collapsed pile of unwatched movies)

Well if you haven't seen the film already, don't bother. It's an incredibly puerile, dinky little Scorsese imitation, and also has Rachel Griffiths, who should have gone to jail, or been hanged, for her terrible performance as Johnny Depp's mother. In my opinion.