DVD Addict

The prospect of more classic films appearing on Blu-ray has got me all hot under the collar. And I just want you to be excited, too!

The Blu-ray Good News

Good news everybody! I've decided to take time off from moaning about 3D to talk about something else close to my heart. I have a real passion for 'classic' cinema - the kind of films made in the days when everybody smoked, men always wore hats and telephone exchanges were populated exclusively by impeccably groomed young ladies on roller-skates.

Anyway, earlier I wrote about Eureka's Blu-ray release of FW Murnau's 1927 Sunrise, how brilliant the disc was and how I thought that the format's 'brightest future resides in cinema's past'.

HD Harryhausen

While Sony Pictures is still taking its time bringing Lawrence of Arabia to Blu-ray (I have a feeling we might see it in 2012 - the film's 50th anniversary) the company has at least dug into its archives and is preparing to unleash Jason and the Argonauts in hi-def in the US this summer. While I have a feeling that the transfer will suffer from the same unavoidable optical issues that hit Warner Home Video's recent Clash of the Titans disc, I'm still excited about watching Ray Harryhausen's stop-motion skeletons in Full HD. But even that pales into insignificance next to the info slowly leaking out of Warner these days. First up came the listing on UK web retailers for a Blu-ray edition of Forbidden Planet, which apparently hit as part of a wave of sci-fi movies this September. Then came the screening of a new digital restoration of the 1933 version of King Kong at the TCM Classic Film Festival in LA, where film critic Leonard Maltin revealed that this restoration will 'yield a Blu-ray home video release later this year'. Let's hope that UK rights-holder Universal secures access to all of the assets for this release. But if not, the Warner disc is pretty much guaranteed to be region-free, so importing that shouldn't be a problem.

Citizen Kane and BenHur DVDs

Then, Just as I was getting over the shock of the Kong news came an official announcement from the US arm of Warner that the company is putting the Citizen Kane and BenHur DVDs on moratorium while both titles undergo restorations in preparation for new DVD and Blu-ray editions. The only downside is the fact that we're going to have to wait until 2011 to see them both.

Add to this Eureka Entertainment's confirmation of a restored and reconstructed Blu-ray Director's Cut of Fritz Lang's 1927 sci-fi classic Metropolis later this year, and you can see why I'm over the moon with what the future has to hold for my Blu-ray collection.

The Blu-Ray Bad News

But just as every cloud has a silver lining, so the opposite still seems to apply. Despite all of the good news I've just reeled off, from my chats with various insiders, studios are still extremely cautious about spending large amounts of money on these HD editions of classic films. The truth is that those released aren't selling well - certainly not at the level that they ever performed on DVD. That's a shame, because done correctly, these films look better than ever on Blu, and that's a message that still doesn't seem to be getting out to everyone. So, consider yourself informed.