I thought the Hitchcock estate only owned five films outright?ianungstad wrote:Universal doesn't own the Hitchcock films. They are licensed from the Hitchcock estate and have been distributed by multiple studios over the years.
Certainly, the Universal-produced Frenzy has never been distributed by anyone else as far as I'm aware - and the same goes for all the Hitchcock films from The Birds onwards. Hitchcock used to own the famously self-financed Psycho, but sold the rights to Universal in exchange for a whopping amount of MCA stock, so I think I'm reasonably safe in claiming that everything from Psycho onwards is owned by Universal outright.
And since the worst transfers in the box are mostly of the films that are indeed 100% owned by Universal (Marnie, Frenzy, Family Plot), Movie-Brat's question is a very good one - and I wish I knew the answer!