Category: DVD

Weinsteins start upscale DVD label
LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) – Bob and Harvey Weinstein have already made their mark on Hollywood.
Now, the former Miramax Films chiefs are bent on leaving their imprint on the DVD business as well, with a premium label they hope will rival the prestigious Criterion Collection or Warner Home Video’s extravagant collector’s editions of such marquee films as “Gone With the Wind” and “The Wizard of Oz.”
The Miriam Collection, named after the brothers’ mother, launched in late January with the release of one of the last great epics not previously available on DVD, Anthony Mann’s “El Cid.”
The second release is another Mann film, “The Fall of the Roman Empire,” a lavish 1961 production starring Alec Guinness, Sophia Loren and Omar Sharif. The film earned its place in the record books for the largest outdoor set in Hollywood history: more than 55 acres, with a reconstructed Roman Forum.
The film comes to DVD on April 29 from Genius Products, the independent DVD distribution company majority owned by the Weinsteins.
“The Miriam Collection is a very personal selection of films,” Harvey Weinstein said. “The brand is not only about remastering films for the best picture and sound but also to showcase the backstory of each film and develop compelling features that complement the title.”
Weinstein said he and his brother plan to pick 12-15 films for branded release each year, ranging from such big productions as “El Cid,” “Roman Empire,” “Circus World” and “55 Days at Peking” to niche titles like “The Deal,” a British TV movie from “The Queen” director Stephen Frears.
Weinstein clearly relishes being able to play kingmaker and give deserving films the true DVD VIP treatment a la the fabled Criterion Collection.
“‘The Fall of the Roman Empire,’ for example, is fully loaded,” Weinstein said. “It looks and sounds astonishing, and the bonus materials fully explore the sheer magnitude and grandeur of making a film of this scale in a time long before the advent of CGI.”
Indeed, the Weinsteins’ DVD version of “Roman Empire” will come in an elegantly packaged three-disc edition. Extras include a commentary by Bill Bronston, son of producer Samuel Bronston, and film expert Mel Martin; a reproduction of the original 1964 souvenir program; a behind-the-scenes look at the fall of the real Roman Empire; a detailed “making of” documentary; five Encyclopedia Britannica featurettes on the Roman Empire; and a set of six color production stills.

Oscar noms awaiting DVD release
Only one of this year’s best-picture nominees has debuted on DVD.
Michael Clayton, with seven nominations in total, arrived this week in a single-disc edition with modest-yet-effective bonus materials. The highlight is a revealing commentary by writer-director Tony Gilroy, who explains how star George Clooney empowered his project after years of “walking in the wilderness.”
Up next is No Country for Old Men, the violent masterpiece from Joel and Ethan Coen and the nominations co-leader with eight. It debuts March 11 in a single-disc edition.
Predictably, the Coen Brothers won’t say much. They often give mumbling answers in interviews. But the DVD extras may illuminate the challenges of the project, anyway. Hopefully, they will focus on the stellar work of Tommy Lee Jones, Josh Brolin and Woody Harrelson, all overlooked in the Oscar noms as Javier Bardem burst into prominence.
Further out is P.T. Anderson’s There Will be Blood, the other nominations co-leader with eight. It is due April 8 in a two-disc collector’s edition, which obviously will include generous bonus materials on the second disc.
Following that is Juno, set for an April 15 release in single-disc format. Juno is doing very well in theatres, despite minor backlash over its pregnant-teen theme. The worldwide box office is up to $143 million, most of it in North America. It is the clear box-office winner among the best-picture noms.
As for the final best-picture nominee, Atonement (tied with Michael Clayton with seven noms), no DVD dates have been announced yet.
Other Oscar nominees are currently available on DVD.
Among them is Ratatouille (five noms); La Vie en Rose (three noms); The Bourne Ultimatum (three noms); Transformers (three noms); Away From Her (two noms); 3:10 to Yuma (two noms); Elizabeth: The Golden Age (two noms); American Gangster (two noms); Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (two noms); In The Valley of Elah (one nom); The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (one nom); Eastern Promises (one nom); Gone Baby Gone (one nom); Surf’s Up (one nom); Once (one nom); Across the Universe (one nom); and the idiotic Norbit (one nom).
Nominees due soon include Into the Wild (two noms), which is due March 4, and Enchanted (three noms), due March 18.
If you want to delve into Oscar’s past, however, Fox, MGM and United Artists have teamed on five new box sets, all keyed to historic Oscar winners.
Three boxes contain best- picture winners, organized by studio. MGM’s four-disc Best Picture Collection has Rocky, Platoon, Dances With Wolves and The Silence of the Lambs. The five-disc Fox box has How Green Was My Valley, Gentleman’s Agreement, All About Eve and The Sound of Music. The four-disc United Artists set has Marty, The Apartment, West Side Story and Tom Jones.
There are two other boxes, each devoted to the acting craft. The five-disc Best Actor Collection has In Old Arizona, The King and I, Patton, Harry and Tonto and Wall Street, featuring winners from Warner Baxter to Michael Douglas. The five-disc Best Actress Collection has Anastasia, The Three Faces of Eve, Norma Rae, Boy’s Don’t Cry and Walk the Line, featuring winners from Ingrid Bergman to Reese Witherspoon.

Three Oscar films set DVD dates
ïJuno arrives on DVD ($29.98) and Blu-ray ($39.98) on April 15 from 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment. Juno is nominated for four Academy Awards: picture, director, original screenplay and actress for up-and-coming star Ellen Page.
ïThe Savages, nominated for two Oscars (actress for Laura Linney and original screenplay for writer/director Tamara Jenkins), arrives on DVD ($27.98) April 22 from Fox Home Entertainment.
ïLars and the Real Girl arrives on DVD ($27.98) April 15 from MGM Home Entertainment. Starring Ryan Gosling, it’s up for original screenplay.

No Country For Old Men Misses Pre-Oscar DVD Release
Iíve been rather surprised at the amount of Oscar nominated films that will be hitting DVD in the next few weeks, giving the mass public a chance to take in the movies before the Oscar ceremony. This kind of approach may not help movies win Oscars, but it will make the ceremony potentially more interesting to more people. After all, itís hard to get excited about a ceremony for movies nobody has seen.
Unfortunately, one of the big contenders this year, nominated for eight awards, wonít be taking that approach. While No Country For Old Men will be coming to DVD and Blu-ray soon, its March 11th release date wonít give you the chance to see the movie before the Oscar ceremony. If I had to guess, that release date gives them the chance to replace that quote you see at the top of the artwork on the right with ìWinner of X-Number of Oscarsî should the movie perform well at the Academy Awards.
Right now the announced extras seem a little thin, particularly for a Blu-ray release (which appears to have the exact same bonus materials as the standard DVD). Hereís a look at what you can expect to find on this March 11th release:
– Working with the Coens: Reflections of Cast and Crew – Learn more about Joel and Ethan Coen from the perspective of their collaborators, cast and crew.
– The Making of No Country For Old Men – Take a journey through the Coen Brothersí process and back to their roots as storytellers with a unique voice and vision.
– Diary of a Country Sheriff – Explore the relationship between the compassion of Sheriff Bell and the brutality of Anton Chigurh.

BLU-RAY SKIES ARE HERE
The fat lady hasn’t sung yet, but for all intents and purposes, it looks like the next-generation DVD battle between Blu-ray and HD DVD is pretty much over.
The winner of the two-year battle – akin to the Betamax and VHS war of the ’80s – seems to be Blu-ray, thanks largely to Warner Bros. Home Video’s recent announcement that it’ll be going all Blu-ray, all the time, after late May. (It had been the only movie studio that hadn’t picked a side, releasing in both Blu-ray and HD DVD formats.)
Warner will be joining Blu-ray-only studios including Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, Walt Disney Home Entertainment, 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, MGM and Lionsgate. This leaves Universal, Paramount and DreamWorks as the sole HD DVD supporters – although it’s been reported that Paramount will be ditching its HD DVD support now that Warner Bros. has done it, thanks to a clause in Paramount’s HD DVD-exclusivity contract.
What does this mean for you? Here are some answers to those burning questions you have about Blu-ray.
Q – Can you use a Blu-ray player if you don’t have a high-def TV?
Yes, but unless you’ve got a TV producing 720p, 1080i or 1080p resolution, ìthere’s no point in buying a Blu-ray player,” says David Katzmaier, CNET.com senior editor. ìYou can hook it up with your S-video [connection], and you’re going to see a darn good picture, but there’s not going to be much difference between a [standard] DVD and a Blu-ray player. You really need a newer, preferably larger, HDTV to experience the difference.”
Q – Does size matter when it comes to watching Blu-ray on an HDTV?
Yes. ìThe bigger the TV [40 inches and larger], the more it matters,” says Consumer Reports senior project leader Maurice Wynn, especially when you’re forced to sit closer to the TV than you’d like. ìThe closer you sit to your TV, the more you’d need to have high definition, like Blu-ray,” he says.
Q – What do you need to get the most out of your Blu-ray?
Definitely an HDTV. Katzmaier also recommends HDMI cables, ìif you’re going to get a Blu-ray player, you might as well spend a little bit more and get a cable – we recommend monoprice.com.” Meanwhile, Wynn says you won’t go wrong with an audio system, because ìBlu-ray discs can theoretically have better-quality sound since they have more [memory] capacity and studios can put higher data audio on the disc.”
Q – Do you need to replace all your standard DVDs with Blu-rays?
No. All Blu-ray players will play standard DVDs, although some do a better job at it than others (check out sites like CNET.com’s home video reviews for opinions on which ones do this the best).
Q – Should you rush out and buy a Blu-ray player now?
Probably not. They’re still expensive – the cheapest one on the market is $300 – and there aren’t that many Blu-ray discs out there yet. But if you’re really desperate, Katzmaier suggests getting a PlayStation 3. ìIt’s basically a Blu-ray player and a gaming console, without any compromises. There are no video or audio quality differences, and it does a great job playing [standard] DVDs. It’s basically a little supercomputer [with built-in Web access], which allows you to do a lot of upgrades when Blu-ray requires it, making it the most future-ready Blu-ray player out there.”

Duckman – Studio Exec VP Goes on Record: Duckman Coming to DVD! Date Not Yet Revealed, But It IS In The Works!
Our good friend Susanne Ault, of trade magazine Video Business, has put together a new story posted yesterday at VB’s website, titled “CBS DVD to increase its release slate: Label plans to roll out 105 to 110 titles”. In it, Susanne discusses how CBS DVD “now retains creative oversight over series from former sibling Paramount Television, including Beverly Hills 90210 and Twin Peaks, and Showtime, home of Dexter and The L Word…(and d)espite Viacom and CBS now being separate companies, Viacom’s Paramount Home Entertainment and CBS DVD work together, with Paramount handling sales and distribution and the two companies sharing marketing duties.” This, by the way, is essentially why we here at TVShowsOnDVD tend to refer to releases as being from “CBS/Paramount”, due to the shared nature of the production and distribution.
Susanne’s article goes over how CBS DVD intends to release 13-18% more TV-DVD titles in 2008 – roughly 105-110 planned releases – as compared to their 2007 slate. In it, she covers three major pieces of news for fans. Two of them concern HD DVD-format releases, and we’ve posted about those separately. The DVD-specific news in Susanne’s story, though, will bowl over fans who have been waiting for a release for a looong time of…Duckman!
Klasky-Csupo (Rugrats, The Wild Thornberrys) produced this 1994 animated series, with a cast that includes the voices of Jason Alexander (Seinfeld), Gregg Berger (“Grimlock” from Transformers), singer Dweezil Zappa, Nancy Travis (Becker) and Tim Curry (The Rocky Horror Picture Show). It is currently the 83rd-most-wanted unreleased series among TVShowsOnDVD voters, and has massive support around the internet for a home video release. It looks like this is coming out at long last. Here is what Susanne’s story says:
(CBS DVD Executive VP and General Manager Ken) Ross hopes to keep satisfying consumer demand through 2008 with the release of Duckman, a cult ’90s animated program. An online petition for the series’ DVD bow has garnered more than 7,000 signatures.
“There has been a level of fan demand for this show for a long time,” said Ross, who declined to specify exact reasons for the DVD release hold-up. “We really had to wrap our brain around figuring a way to do it.”
Exact street date or pricing has not yet been set for Duckman, but it’s possible that multiple seasons will be released within one package next year.
“Our philosophy is that we are TV, so we are going to work harder than anybody to try to find a way to put a series out if there is a demand for it,” said Ross. “We bring that same mentality to any and everything we can do.”
I suspect Duckman fans are dancing around the room in celebration of this terrific news, but as stated we do not have a release date yet. It’s safe to assume we’ll see it in 2008, and we hope to break that news to you just as soon as we can. So stay tuned!

DVD unit sales dropped 4.5 pct in ’07, says data firm
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – U.S. DVD unit sales fell 4.5 percent in 2007, marking the first big year-over-year decline for the category since the disc format debuted in 1997, according to preliminary estimates released on Thursday.
After essentially flat trends for 2005 and 2006, sales of films and TV shows on DVDs fell from 1.144 billion units in 2006, to 1.092 billion units in 2007, said Tom Adams, president of Adams Media Research, a California-based entertainment data firm. The figures include next-generation DVD sales.
Unit sales in 2005 were down 0.3 percent from 2004, and inched up 0.2 percent in 2006 from 2005, Adams said.
According to Adams Media tallies, consumer spending on DVDs fell 4.8 percent to $15.7 billion in 2007 from $16.5 billion in 2006.
Adams noted that while unit sales were flat in 2005, spending also declined that year by about 1.5 percent.
Major studios had hoped for substantial sales gains in the fourth quarter of 2007 with the release of such hits as “Fantastic Four,” “Ratatouille,” and “Transformers.”
But Adams said fourth quarter DVD sales essentially matched the fourth quarter of 2006.
“The main culprit has been the decaying sales of new releases,” Adams said. “The average performance on new releases per box office dollar has been declining since 2003. And this year, sales of TV shows on DVD fell for the first time ever. Catalog sales also declined,” he said.
Catalog sales are the sales of films that have been out on the market previously.
The DVD format was launched in 1997, when sales totaled about $6.2 billion.
The industry registered double digit sales growth each year for much of this decade, until sales hit about $16.6 billion in 2004.
Adams believes a combination of factors have contributed to the slowdown, including the fact that most households have slowed building their DVD collections after extremely aggressive pricing on catalog products drove huge gains over the past few years.
Adams believes the industry will likely suffer continued slowness in 2008 and 2009 as a format war for next-generation DVDs plays out and before next-generation DVD players become widespread. The industry will be back on a healthy growth track in 2010, as high-definition DVDs take off, according to Adams.
“High-definition is the ray of hope for the industry,” he said.

DVD gets Zapped!
Zapped!, the ’80s paranormal sex romp starring Scott Baio will go digital with a new DVD release in February.
The disc carries an anamorphic widescreen transfer and the original stereo sound mix. No extras have been announced, but with a tagline like They’re getting a little behind in their classwork, what more could you possibly ask for.
Arriving February 12th from MGM Home Entertainment, the disc retails for $14.98.

Mounties bust fake DVD scam in Montreal
The RCMP have seized thousands of counterfeit DVDs of popular American TV shows and arrested eight people suspected of masterminding a black-market scam to sell the videos.
Mountie investigators raided an undisclosed Montreal location Tuesday where they found thousands of illegal DVD copies of shows like The Six Million Dollar Man and Ally McBeal, as well as 200 DVD burners.
Eight people were arrested and face several fraud charges under the Canadian Criminal Code and Copyright Law.
The RCMP believe the DVDs were burned in Montreal and sold widely across North America through several internet sites.
The counterfeit DVDs were sold at market prices which led buyers to believe they were purchasing original copies.
Canada’s national police force warned consumers to be vigilant when buying DVDs online. Counterfeit versions are typically of poorer quality, the RCMP said at a press conference Wednesday.
People who believe they’ve bought counterfeit versions can contact the RCMP at 1-514-939-8307, or the Canadian Association of Film Distributors at 1-800-363-9166.

Director Scott favours this ‘Blade Runner’
This holiday season, director Ridley Scott and science-fiction-film fans both get to cross a long-hoped-for item off of their wish lists: an ultimate home video version of his 1982 hit Blade Runner.
In making the futuristic noir classic, which starred Harrison Ford, Scott was coerced to add a happier ending and Ford’s voice-over to the complex film about “replicants,” or androids, who wanted to become human.
Studio executives, Scott says, found the film “too oppressive or even non-specific, and wanted to see did (Ford’s character Deckard and Sean Young’s Rachael) have a life after the movie.”
Scott, 70, who has already earned best-director and best-picture Golden Globe nominations for his latest film, American Gangster, concedes that at the time, “I was not as experienced as I am now and kind of went along with the process of readjustments.” But after the fact, he realized that the ending with Deckard and Rachael headed into the beautiful mountain range “was always a problem for me. It was too sweet.”
For this 25th anniversary Blade Runner: The Final Cut, Scott oversaw an exacting digital restoration. He left off the original voice-over and happy ending, digitally tweaked some effects and restored a few extra bits of violence. Scott also reshot the death of Zhora (Joanna Cassidy), which was originally done by a stuntwoman with a bad wig, a fact that over the years grated on Scott and viewers alike.
This version, which played in some theaters and at film festivals, is just out in multiple editions, including a five-DVD “limited ultimate collector’s set” in a numbered plastic briefcase ($79). That set includes the final cut and four other versions of the film ó the original theatrical and international versions, the 1992 director’s cut and a “work print” ó plus a piece of film from the original movie, unicorn figurine, miniature car and photos.
Also available: five-disc HD DVD and Blu-ray ultimate limited editions ($100), a two-DVD final cut special edition ($21) and a four-DVD collector’s edition ($35).
All editions include a new documentary, Dangerous Days: Making Blade Runner, and a movie-length audio commentary by Scott, who considers this final cut his favorite version. After its digital makeover, Scott says the film looks as if “it could have been made this week. This isn’t some old walnut I’m dragging out of the sock drawer. It could have been released now.”