

For most UK-based film buffs, the Criterion Collection – a label dedicated to releasing lavishly packaged, bonus feature-laden DVD and Blu-ray editions of classic and contemporary cinema – holds an exotic, covetable status. Since the company’s launch in 1984, its products have only been available in the US and Canada, forcing Brits to pursue often costly workarounds.

Over a decade ago, after investing in a multi-region DVD player, I purchased my first Criterion disc – an imported copy of Neil Jordan’s grimy London noir Mona Lisa – for the princely sum of £39.99 from the The Cinema Store, a one-stop film-buff hub on the West End’s Upper St Martin’s Lane. The subsequent rise of online purchasing has made it easier to get hold of cheaper Criterion discs from abroad, but has also contributed to the downfall of specialist outlets such as The Cinema Store, which closed in January this year.

Some good news is on the horizon, however. On 18 April, the Criterion Collection officially launches on Blu-ray in the UK, following a multi-year distribution deal with Sony Pictures Home Entertainment. Its first tranche of releases comprises six titles, featuring all the supplements from the US editions, along with their exclusive packaging and artwork. These are: the indelible documentary Grey Gardens; Frank Capra’s classic romance It Happened One Night; Ted Wilde’s comedy Speedy; Roman Polanski’s grungy take on Macbeth; Howard Hawks’s suspense drama Only Angels Have Wings; and Sydney Pollack’s 1982 comedy Tootsie.

Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie, a film about an actor who dresses as a woman to land a new role. (1982) Photograph: Allstar/Columbia/Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar

Given the company’s international cachet, why has the move taken so long? “We’ve thought about it for many years because clearly we didn’t have a language barrier,” company CEO Jonathan Turell told me. “We always did have a PAL/NTSC [video format] barrier, but that disappeared with the advent of HD and Blu-ray.”

Turell also credits the company’s “solid, symbiotic relationship” with Sony, who assumed control of Criterion’s US distribution back in 2013, as a reason for further expansion. Moreover, despite the acceleration of the online space as a form of distribution and a platform for consumption – a market into which Criterion has also entered – there remains a healthy appetite for physical, tangible entertainment products. Last year, for example, consumers in Britain purchased £514.5m worth of physical music, with vinyl and CD jointly claiming 49% of all money spent on recorded tracks and albums.

In the UK, Criterion is entering into a crowded marketplace, with labels such as BFI, Second Run, Eureka Entertainment and Arrow Films all publishing specialist home entertainment for film-literate audiences. Last year, meanwhile, Arrow pulled a reverse-Criterion by expanding into the US market. I asked Francesco Simeoni, Arrow’s head of production and acquisition, for his views on the current climate. “I think Criterion’s move to the UK and our own to the US is indicative of the transforming landscape of physical home entertainment distribution,” he said. “It’s not dying; it’s evolving. How much [Criterion] stimulate the UK market, however, remains to be seen. There are already a hell of a lot of excellent labels here.”

And how will Criterion’s UK presence affect companies such as Arrow, who have previously assumed the task of licensing for British circulation titles released by Criterion in the US? “A knock-on effect will be more competition for new licensing deals, but there are plenty of films out there,” says Simeoni. “As regards our old titles nothing should change really. We’ve distributed [Jules Dassin’s] Rififi and [Vittorio De Sica’s] Bicycle Thieves for many years and that won’t stop overnight.”

As for Criterion’s future UK plans, “We want to get a critical mass into the market relatively quickly,” says Turell. “After the first wave, we’ll probably follow up with another six a couple of months thereafter, and then probably two titles a month, three titles every other month.”

There are currently no plans for UK-exclusive titles; rather, forthcoming releases will be drawn from the Collection’s existing inventory of 800-plus titles which includes work by storied auteurs such as Godard, Kurosawa, Cocteau, Fellini, Bergman, Tarkovsky, Hitchcock, Kubrick, and Eisenstein. (It is, you’ll note, a conspicuously male-dominated field. Scholar Sophie Mayer – author of Political Animals: The New Feminist Cinema – recently calculated that under 3% of films in the entire Criterion Collection are either directed or co-directed by women.)

While it is to be hoped that Criterion UK will forge ahead with a more inclusive slate, broadly speaking there will be no lack of options for the curators to choose from. “For the first time in 30-plus years of business, we have licensing arrangements with all the major American studios,” Turell told me. “Our biggest shortage is slots in the schedule – we have more films than we have slots for.” The Criterion Collection, it seems, is going from strength to strength, and Britain is the latest beneficiary.