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According to Mike's Movie Mayhem, the Criterion edition of Spirit of the Beehive went out of print today: http://dvdlist.kazart.com/queryDVDList.php3?id=89007" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

It's not listed as out of print on the Criterion website. It was licensed from a company called Video Mercury, so I don't see any reason for it to be discontinued. I wonder if maybe they have something in the works like the Varda box and the film will be reissued soon-ish? El Sur has been rumored for awhile. They could pretty much put the complete Victor Erice in a 3 disc box.

Strange to see the moratorium on the title.

I wouldn't be surprised if it was a packaging change.

Or to accommodate a Blu.

ianungstad wrote:According to Mike's Movie Mayhem, the Criterion edition of Spirit of the Beehive went out of print today: http://dvdlist.kazart.com/queryDVDList.php3?id=89007" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

It's not listed as out of print on the Criterion website. It was licensed from a company called Video Mercury, so I don't see any reason for it to be discontinued. I wonder if maybe they have something in the works like the Varda box and the film will be reissued soon-ish? El Sur has been rumored for awhile. They could pretty much put the complete Victor Erice in a 3 disc box.

Criterion site now lists this:

Buy at Amazon.com

Unfortunately, we are not able to offer this product for sale on Criterion.com. Please note that it is not out of print and is available at other retailers, like Amazon.com

I would bet that they're repackaging it to put it in a standard DVD case, getting rid of the digipak.

Spirit of the Beehive is getting reissued on Jan.8 and is available for preorder on Amazon. Looks like they lowered the MSRP to $29.95 like most new releases. Like Matt said, it will probably be in a plastic case instead of a digipack.

It would be nice if Criterion considered a Victor Erice box - Spirit of the Beehive, El Sur, Quince Tree Sun and his collected shorts, including his contribution to the 10 Years Older project and his brand new episode of the portmanteau film Centro Histórico (world premiere, Rome Film Festival, Nov. 2012).

Erice´s episode, "Broken Windows", will apparently also be available separately in a longer version according to online info in Spanish some months ago.

I cannot understand why Criterion would just bump the DVD down to a lower-tier plastic case release, passing on the chance to do a blu upgrade alongside it.

This doesn't mean they're passing on a chance - it just might not be announced yet, and this was up for reprinting and they made the decision to make this change now rather than waiting.

I just worry about what this portends. Would they really have a bunch of people buy the DVD at the new lower price and then announce a blu-ray upgrade within a relatively short time span after that? Seems entirely possible now that the upgrade won't come for another year and half, two years. Maybe they'll announce the blu upgrade in the next couple months, though.

Are there really going to be that many people who've spent the last several years avoiding this one until a price drop of $10 in MSRP (which translates to about $5 after discounts are factored in most instances, etc) after which they immediately scoop it up? I don't know that I'd be too sad that Criterion is lowering the prices on any of their releases - it can only be a good thing. Even if you buy it - it's the same thing with any upgrade - just sell the DVD before word of the upgrade gets spread too far and you should only be paying pennies on the dollar for the Blu upgrade.

I don't know how many people it would affect, but I'm trying to guess what this means based on patterns of past Criterion rereleases. They tend to have thing coincide, so the fact that they're not simply letting this title be OOP for a few months while they get the new DVD and blu upgrade both ready suggests to me that the blu isn't coming anytime soon.

Criterion probably just didn't want to reprint the more expensive digipaks once their existing stock ran out.

This has happened before with The Rules of the Game (and perhaps other titles). They stopped printing the DVD digipak and blue plastic sleeve for Rules and put the old release in a standard case about a year before they did a new transfer and supplements for the Blu-ray and DVD upgrade. I don't think this is a particularly ominous sign.

I'd forgotten that about Rules of the Game. If I'm remembering right, however, that precedent did not involve a price drop to entice buyers to the new package the way Spirit of the Beehive does. Another precedent that involved both new packaging and a price drop (a sizable one, since the Carver book was no longer included) was Short Cuts, which they never followed up with a blu upgrade.

Short Cuts was reissued without the book a few months before Criterion was even releasing Blu-rays.

So a blu upgrade for it wouldn't have been out of the question. They could have just delayed the repackaging of the DVD set and had a lapse in availability as is common, right? They've opted to just do the DVD repackage/price drop.

I think we're all just telling you not to worry about it.

Gregory wrote:So a blu upgrade for it wouldn't have been out of the question. They could have just delayed the repackaging of the DVD set and had a lapse in availability as is common, right? They've opted to just do the DVD repackage/price drop.

They let The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp fall into the EAH line. IIRC, the BD is expected to be announced in Q1, 2013.

Blimp came out in a stripped-down EAH release, but the original release with the commentary and other supplements is still available. Criterion put a bunch on their films in the EAH line in stripped-down editions without taking the original releases out of print. I think the exceptions are Pygmalion and Variety Lights, which never had any features to begin with.

The issue was whether there was a precedent for Criterion repackaging and reducing the price on a mainline DVD and following that up with an announced BD. Blimp shows that there is and it's irrelevant that the original DVD issue remains in the line.

Putting all the other stuff aside, the parallel EAH line does seem like a different category of precedents here.

Gregory wrote:Putting all the other stuff aside, the parallel EAH line does seem like a different category of precedents here.

How so? It's changing the packaging and reducing the price. It's certainly as relevant to the original question as removing a booklet from Short Cuts.

These are all kind of different situations. They removed the book from Short Cuts because they lost the rights to it. The EAH line, other than a couple of exclusives, generally existed to move even more copies of some of Janus' most high profile titles, the kind that are also very likely to get Blu upgrades.

swo17 wrote:These are all kind of different situations. They removed the book from Short Cuts because they lost the rights to it. The EAH line, other than a couple of exclusives, generally existed to move even more copies of some of Janus' most high profile titles, the kind that are also very likely to get Blu upgrades.

I guess I misunderstood. I thought the general question being asked was has Criterion ever repackaged/altered the package of a mainline DVD, reduced the price and then followed on with a BD announcement. While both your example and mine aren't exactly what Criterion seem to be doing with Spirit (unless something is being removed in addition to the package change or it's going to be presented at two different price points), they both illustrate a valid answer to the general question. There's ample precedent for Criterion altering their original DVD release in one way or another and then announcing a subsequent Blu-ray release. I apologize if I got it wrong and I took up bandwidth with an unhelpful response.

I believe they did actually go through the whole repackage/reprice/release on blu process with Down By Law, didn't they?