Quote:
Originally Posted by stonesfan129
It would be nice to see Criterion throw in some more popular titles in their releases. Yeah it's nice seeing some unreleased/unknown films in there, but I love when they remaster something that had a terrible or non-existent Blu-ray release such as Thief. Wonder if we can get The Keep too.
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In addition to every release mentioned so far, I can come up with at least 100 films that aren’t “Criterion movies” that Criterion has dropped. The Princess Bride, Bamboozled, Citizen Kane, After Hours, like they aren’t just an arthouse company anymore. They went through that phase where every month was just Bergman and Truffaut, but now for lack of better words they’re back the way they were in the laserdisc days, yeah they have some arthouse stuff, but they have some legendary titles too. (For those who aren’t familiar with their laserdiscs, some of them include King Kong, It’s A Wonderful Life, The Wizard Of Oz, Monty Python And The Holy Grail, The Silence Of The Lambs, Chasing Amy, Pulp Fiction, and even The Rock and Armageddon. They also planned but cancelled a laserdisc of Gone With The Wind.)
So yeah, Criterion has done and is doing popular titles. They can’t just show up at the Disney doors and say “Give us Star Wars or we’ll shoot!”, they sometimes get big deals for dozens if not hundreds of titles in a split second, and then there’s other ones where they spend years working to het one film. After Hours took five years. Freaks, assuming they have it (WB’s stuff is OOP, and they’re still officially “looking for better materials”), is at eight years and counting. Citizen Kane, considering when they started trying to get it back, took decades. They wanted it in 1998 for their first DVD, but by then its reputation had picked up considerably from the 80s and early 90s, and 80s era RKO had sold the rights to Turner, who then entered an exclusive contract with WB, and neither would budge. They wanted it for their first Blu-ray, again nothing. They wanted it for all their hundreds and eventually number 1000, again nothing. They tried to do number 1001, and make the goal of 1001-2000 to bring out all their old titles, again nothing. (They have brought a lot of their laserdisc titles back out though.) By the time they got to 4K, and wanted Citizen Kane to be their first 4K (I don’t know of it’s first spine-wise but it was the first one dropped), WB had people willing to make deals with boutiques, and Citizen Kane finally happened. For Criterion, Kane was like a missing piece in their puzzle, and they spent over 20 years trying to get it.
Licensing agreements are a b*tch, always have been, always will be, and that’s why you don’t see “more popular movies” from Criterion. If they had their say they’d probably be up to spine 80,000 by now, but it just doesn’t work that way.
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