Criterion adding Blu-Ray titles from October

Now that the format war is well and truly over, it's not a shock to report that the awesome guys at the Criterion Collection will begin to release Blu-Ray titles from October but what is significant are their first list of titles. All of them are back catalogue which is a collective sigh of relief for those worried that the mega expensive collection will no longer be releasing new flicks on the standard DVD format. For now, it seems Criterion will play the waiting game and simply re-release old titles until the day comes when the standard DVD format is dying out. Something that isn't happening right as latest figures show that the death of HD hasn't effected the selling rate of Blu-Ray DVD at all just yet. Not that much money going around these days.

Here are the first list of titles to be released in Blu-Ray beginning in October. I'm loving that they haven't gone for the obvious one's (Seven Samurai, Amacord, etc.) which are two of the biggest Criterion releases in history and neither have they gone just for the visually stunning titles such as Days of Heaven or a more recent title which a upgrade might be more noticeable like The Ice Storm. They have done... what they have always done. Unique titles from a whole host of different genre's which challenge the label to showcase best prints of movies like Gimmie Shelter and For All Mankind - hardly the most mainstream of titles. The annoucement came last night in the form of this newsletter...

We€™ve got some exciting news for this fall, and we wanted you to hear it first. 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.

I still haven't bought into the whole Blu-Ray adoption thing just yet but when the moment comes that a huge box set with tons of new features of say a Sergio Leone or Tarantino box set comes out, then I'm not sure I would be able to resist.