Goddamnit, Now I Have to Buy a Blu-Ray Player

Posted on May 9, 2008

Announcement from the Criterion Collection:

We’ve got some exciting news for this fall: 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

I’ve been wondering if Criterion was going to adopt Blu-Ray or not — they published only on Laserdisc for many years, and when DVD came out, they actually resisted publishing in that format for several years because they believed Laserdisc to be the technically superior format. (I’m sure that it didn’t hurt that they could charge $150 for Laserdisc editions, either.) I guess we can mark that question “answered”…

(Oh, and if you’ve never seen any of the movies on that list, what are you waiting for? The Third Man is one of the best movies ever, in my opinion; Gimme Shelter and Bottle Rocket are great too.)