Warner Bros. Home Entertainment announced this past week
that writer/director Edward Bernds’ 1956 sci-fi masterpiece, World
Without End, starring Hugh Marlowe, Rod Taylor and Nancy Gates will be
making its way to the Blu-ray market place on Mar. 28.
This Technicolor gem features Marlowe and Taylor, along with
Nelson Leigh and Christopher Dark, as four astronauts on a return flight from a
look-see at Mars. They are caught in a
meteor swarm and their spacecraft accelerates to a speed that what we would
come to know as “warp” speed (thank you, Star Trek) and is catapulted forward
in time to the year 2058. They survive
a harrowing crash-landing on an unknown planet, which they later discover to be
their own planet Earth after an atomic Armageddon.
Exploration leads them to encounters with giant spiders and
Neanderthal-like mutants … and to a mysterious underground city populated by
beautiful women, including Nancy Gates, Shirley Patterson (It! The Terror from Beyond Space)
and Lisa Montell (She Gods of Shark Reef).
The men are weaklings and it is just a matter of time before the mutants
gain entrance and destroy the last vestiges of pre-war civilization!
Also making their Blu-ray debuts during the month of March
from Warner Bros. Home Entertainment are: Director Francis Ford Coppola’s 1968
film release of Finian's Rainbow (Mar. 7); writer/director Blake Edwards’ 1981
comedy S.O.B., teaming Julie Andrews with William Holden (also Mar.
7); director Donald Cammell’s 1977 film adaptation of the Dean R. Koontz novel,
Demon
Seed, starring Julie Christie (Mar. 14) and director James O'Connolly’s
1969 mixed-genre thriller, Valley of the Gwangi, produced by
and with f/x by Ray Harryhausen (starring James Franciscus, Richard Carlson and
Gila Golan).
Warner Bros. Home Entertainment announced this past week
that actor/director Ben Affleck’s film adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s “roaring
twenties” crime novel, Live by Night, will be available on
Mar. 21 as both DVD and Blu-ray product offerings.
The ARR comes in at 88 days and domestic ticket sales from
the film’s Oscar-qualifying theatrical run were a disappointing $10.3 million.
The theatrical launch of Live by Night is yet
another example of the old standby of the “platform” theatrical rollout is no
longer working in today’s digital environment.
The film opened Christmas day in just four theatres (Oscar
qualifying), which signaled to critics that this was an important film. It played for two full weeks at this level
and then on Jan. 13 jumped to just over 2,800 screens nationally. During that two week period the major metro
film critics roasted the film and by the time it opened to a national audience
word was out and no one cared. If you
are going to open a big budget film — this is a gorgeous period film — it has
to go wide, wide, wide on day one (at least 3,500 screens).
As to bonus goodies, common to both the DVD and Blu-ray SKUs
are deleted scenes with commentary.
Exclusive to the Hi-Def release are commentary by actor/director Ben
Affleck and four featurettes — “Angels with Dirty Faces: The Women of Live By
Night,” “The Men of Live by Night,” “Live by Night’s Prolific Author” and “In
Close Up: Creating a Classic Car Chase.”
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