Today Criterion Collection Newsletter subscribers received the following message by e-mail:
Our first Blu-ray discs are coming! We’ve picked a little over a dozen titles from the collection for Blu-ray treatment, and we’ll begin rolling them out in October. These new editions will feature glorious high-definition picture and sound, all the supplemental content of the DVD releases, and they will be priced to match our standard-def editions.
Here’s what’s in the pipeline:
The Third Man
Bottle Rocket
Chungking Express
The Man Who Fell to Earth
The Last Emperor
El Norte
The 400 Blows
Gimme Shelter
The Complete Monterey Pop
Contempt
Walkabout
For All Mankind
The Wages of Fear
Alongside our DVD and Blu-ray box sets of The Last Emperor, we’ll also be putting out the theatrical version as a stand-alone release in both formats, priced at $39.95. Our Blu-ray release of Walkabout will be an all-new edition, featuring new supplements as well as a new transfer; we will also release an updated anamorphic DVD of Nicolas Roeg’s outback masterpiece at the same time.
Exciting news on the one hand, but alarming news on the other, as Criterion collectors will be compelled to double-dip on numerous titles. It seems a purely commercial step to add the likes of THE COMPLETE MONTEREY POP and GIMME SHELTER to a list of initial Blu-ray offerings, as both were originally shot in 16mm and are not likely to add much to their original issues in video quality. That said, Criterion should sell a bunch of them.
Signing up for Criterion's newsletter at their website will entitle you, as a subscriber, to the following special deal: $10 off any order of $60 or more placed at criterion.com through Monday, May 26.
Thanks to VW's Sam Umland for the tip.
Postscript 5/8/08: Reader Aleck Bennett makes a couple of good points...
"Just a quick note on the CC BD offerings: while I agree that the COMPLETE MONTEREY POP and GIMME SHELTER 16mm elements probably wouldn't benefit tremendously from the higher resolution BD offers, I do think that they'll both show improvements in these releases. The higher storage capability, combined with much more efficient codecs (standard-def's MPEG-2 is a notoriously 'lossy' and inefficient codec) will allow for less noticeable compression, leading to a more pleasing viewing experience. Maybe not by *much*, given the 16mm origins, but I'm hoping it'll be noticeable... However, where I think the BD releases will surely shine is in the audio department, given BD's support of lossless audio formats. While the sound mixes used on the standard-def DVDs are pretty nifty, uncompressed versions of the 5.1 mixes should be a real treat. Assuming, of course, that they'll be offering uncompressed versions of the 5.1 mixes!"
