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Jean Renoir: 3 Disc Collector's Edition 4/24/07 $29.98



La Fille de l'eau (Whirlpool of Fate)
Nana
Sur un air de Charleston (Charleston Parade)
La Petite marchande d'allumettes (The Little Match Girl)
La Marseillaise
Le Testament du Docteur Cordelier (The Doctor's Horrible Experiment)
Le Caporal Epingle (The Elusive Corporal)
Jean Renoir: An Auteur to Remember (documentary with Martin Scorsese, Alain Renoir and others)

Woah! Is this for real? What do we expect the quality to be?

Studio Canal quality

7 films on 3 discs? what are Lions Gate releases usually like, do they have a good rep?

sevenarts wrote:7 films on 3 discs? what are Lions Gate releases usually like, do they have a good rep?

Hrm, this feels like the public domain Hitchcock sets.

Wow, I would have paid $30 for Nana alone.

sevenarts wrote:7 films on 3 discs? what are Lions Gate releases usually like, do they have a good rep?

A quick review of DVDBeaver shows Lions Gate consistently winning the comparison battles with its Region 2 counterpart. The are mostly newer films, though.

I have no idea how they can licence those films and release them at that price. MoC were gearing up to licence NANA, but probably won't bother now. The licencing costs (for the film and the extras on the French set) wouldn't have allowed us to release this any cheaper than our normal releases.

NANA is with Arte too, not Studio Canal (like the others), so I don't know what's going on here.

I can only hope they're not PAL > NTSC conversions with yellow subtitles, and bring across the French supplements too.

Otherwise, this would have been a superb Eclipse Series 3.

Yes, the 3 shorter pieces, plus NANA and LA MARSEILLAISE have all been recently restored, so should not be bargain basement releases by any reckoning...

peerpee wrote: MoC were gearing up to licence NANA, but probably won't bother now.

Would a Region 1 release cut into your market that much?

From Video Business:

Lionsgate diversifies with Studio Canal catalog
INDIE FILM GUIDE: Hitchcock box set first release in multi-year deal
By Susanne Ault 1/8/2007

Lionsgate's Hitchcock box set streets Feb. 6.

JAN. 8 | Lionsgate will formally kick off its Studio Canal catalog deal with the Feb. 6 release of the Hitchcock Box Set.

The studio scored 2,000 Studio Canal films in a multi-year pact in July and has been eager to diversify its offerings with classic content.

And later...

The studio will next prepare box sets themed around actress Bridgette Bardot and directors Jean Renoir and Jean-Luc Godard. These sets will street in the first half of 2007.

Sounds like a PAL->NTSC port and a lot of other valuable material including JLG will now be out of bounds to Criterion/Eclipse...

And Nick, NANA is copyrighted DVD to Arte and film to Studio Canal on the box of the French release...

Finally...

Lionsgate hopes to release 10 to 12 Studio Canal box sets annually.

GringoTex wrote:Would a Region 1 release cut into your market that much?

Yes, it would. The dollar is very weak against the pound, and this 7-film set (which can be had for $22.16 which is about £11 GBP) would work out cheaper than a single MoC release of *just NANA*. We can't compete with that, and we're trying whenever possible to shy away from films that are already released with English subtitles (be they from Italy, France, Germany or the USA).

This Lionsgate deal could see a lot of Criterion discs going OOP when their individual licences end.

Well we know the CC have LE CRIME DE M LANGE already licensed from Studio Canal, and for a while anyway, so that should be upcoming soon...

peerpee wrote:This Lionsgate deal could see a lot of Criterion discs going OOP when their individual licences end.

This is a sobering thought considering I don't usually buy more than one Criterion each month.

On the chance that peerpee is right, does anyone know of/have a list of which Criterions are Studio Canal films?

From reading the article -- an I may be wrong -- Lionsgate has scored a bunch of Studio Canal titles, but I'd be surprised if they overlap with Criterion's Studio Canal titles. It would make sense that these 2,000 titles are ones that Criterion would have passed on (the Hitchcock's for instance) for a bundle of reasons.

But really, this is big news and I'm surprised no one else is shitting themselves over the possibility of a Godard box set.

justeleblanc wrote:But really, this is big news and I'm surprised no one else is shitting themselves over the possibility of a Godard box set.

Because that Renoir set is so cheap, you wonder how much effort they'll put into these. I guess we'll find out in April.

GringoTex wrote:Because that Renoir set is so cheap, you wonder how much effort they'll put into these. I guess we'll find out in April.

Well, I assume these wont be as good as Warner or Criterion, but then because newer and better prints now exist since Fox Lorber released DVDs, I also assume these will be better than Fox Lorber. Sorry for speculating, I'm guessing on par with New Yorker, give or take quality concerns for individual prints.

EDIT: Any relation to this box set?

justeleblanc wrote:EDIT: Any relation to this box set?

I'll be excited for any release of previously unavailable Godard titles, but the pricing on this has me skeptical about quality. I'm not expecting Criterion level here but I really hope they do a decent job and avoid PAL-NTSC issues. I wonder what films exactly we're talking about -- we know that Pierrot Le Fou and Two or Three Things are going to be eventual Criterions, so those are probably out of the running. So My Life to Live? Petit Soldat? Made in USA? Maybe some later films? Nothing terribly exciting or shocking, I'm guessing. I wonder if they're going to break up these boxes at all, though. I'd buy a good-quality single-disc of My Life to Live or a few others, but any Godard set like this is likely to duplicate a lot of stuff I already have from R2 Optimum and Raro.

That Optimum Godard set just looks like a repackaging of the R2 discs that Optimum has already released, along with some they've picked up from the OOP R2 Warner boxes. So a similar deal to the Optimum Bunuel set, no relation to this though.

My guess is this box will probably double many R2 titles.

The pricing doesn't bother me too much. It is possible that Lionsgate got a bulk rate and bare-bones, multi-disc box sets are that much cheaper to produce -- assuming the quality of the prints are decent.

Beyond Godard, I wonder if we can see a Bunuel box in the future from Lionsgate.

Le Testament Du Docteur Cordelier

oh man, been waiting for this one!

you guys be sure to post amazon links to all 3 boxsets when you find them ok? I don't want to miss any of the pre-order prices, I'm buying all 3.

Wonderful news, if the transfers are acceptable. Next weekend I was going to transfer my hideous old English-subtitled VHS tapes of Cordelier and Caporal to DVD-R. Usually a news item of this kind breaks 2 days _after_ I've done it.

I wonder if the absence of Déjeuner sur l'herbe (boxed with Le Testament du docteur Cordelier by Studio Canal in France, as La Marseillaise is boxed with Le Caporal épinglé) tells us anything about Criterion's short-to-medium-term plans. Or am I reinventing the wheel with this speculation?

Wow!!! the set actually has some special features.

The marketing department's horrible experiment.

Still not as bad as mistranslating La Grande Illusion “Grand Illusionâ€

They're smart. If they release all of their director's boxes in that clapboard shape, it's going to mess with OCD DVD collectors.

By the way, does this kind of feel like a second Eclipse label to anyone else?