A rather surprising email from The Criterion Collection landed in our inbox this morning. The company announced an OOP (out-of-print) sale where you can save an additional $5 on titles which they will be losing the rights to at the end of March. The surprising part if that many of these titles are a) recent or important releases and b) the rights are now being licensed to Lionsgate by licensors StudioCanal.
Among the recently released titles that will soon be scrubbed clean of the wacky Criterion C include Jean Luc-Godard’s “Pierrot Le Fou,” Jacques Tati’s “Trafic,” “Last Holiday,” “Le Jour Se Leve” and “Mayerling.” Important classic titles such as “Alphaville,” “Diary Of A Country Priest,” “Le Corbeau,” “Fallen Idol,” “Peeping Tom,” “Tales Of Hoffman” and spine number #1 “Grand Illusion” will also be disappearing from the collection.
Lionsgate is not the first name we think of when it comes to classic films, and their severe botch job of John Huston’s “The Dead” last fall (in which they accidentally released an edited version of the film and had to issue a recall) doesn’t exactly thrill us with the prospect of their handling some of cinema’s most important titles. That said, you can expect many of these to appear in the studio’s StudioCanal Collection launching this month with BluRay releases of “Ran,” “The Ladykillers” and “Contempt” (though early reports on those discs – which are direct ports of European editions – are mixed to say the least).
As for Criterion, they usually keep their licensing info (and pretty much everything else) close to the chest, and for them to call out the titles and players involved is a little surprising. We don’t imagine they’re pleased to be losing these titles, but they do say they will try to relicense them in the future. You can see a complete list of the affected titles here.