15 Facts About Criterion Collection

Criterion Collection has helped to standardize certain aspects of home-video releases such as film restoration, the letterboxing format for widescreen films and the inclusion of bonus features such as scholarly essays and commentary tracks.

In 1985, the Steins, William Becker and Jonathan B Turell founded the Voyager Company to publish educational multimedia CD-ROMs, and the Criterion Collection became a subordinate division of the Voyager Company, with Janus Films holding a minority stake in the company, and decided to expand its product on videocassettes and videodiscs.

Criterion Collection began to provide video-on-demand in partnership with MUBI in 2008.

In February 2011, Criterion Collection began switching its VOD offerings exclusively to Hulu Plus.

Thereafter, Criterion Collection made letterboxing the standard presentation for all its releases of films shot in widescreen aspect ratios.

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Criterion Collection began in 1984 with the releases of Citizen Kane and King Kong on LaserDisc, the latter's source negatives courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Criterion Collection later became known for pioneering the "special edition" DVD concept containing bonus materials such as trailers, commentaries, documentaries, alternate endings and deleted scenes.

In 2006, taking advantage of advanced film-transfer and film-restoration technologies, Criterion Collection published higher-quality versions, with bonus materials, of early catalog titles such as Amarcord, Brazil and Seven Samurai .

Originally, Criterion Collection released art, genre and mainstream movies on LaserDisc such as Halloween, Ghostbusters, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Armageddon and The Rock .

Increasingly, the Criterion Collection has focused on releasing world cinema, mainstream cinema classics and critically successful obscure films.

Titles such as RoboCop, Hard Boiled, The Killer and Ran became unavailable when their publishing licenses expired or when Criterion Collection published improved versions, such as those for Beauty and the Beast, M, The Wages of Fear and Seven Samurai .

Criterion Collection produced a restored edition under license from Universal Pictures for the initial edition and for the later anamorphic widescreen rerelease edition of the film.

Criterion Collection was slow to expand into high-definition releases, partly because of the HD format wars between Blu-ray and HD DVD.

In late 2013, Criterion Collection announced that with the November release of the Zatoichi boxset, all future releases would be in dual format rather than as individual releases.

Criterion Collection began publishing titles on Blu-ray Disc in December 2008.