Twilight Time DVD/Bluray Is Shutting Down

[Mitchell Dvoskin]

Existing inventory being sold off at incredible sale prices. $30 titles for between $4 and $12 until the inventory is gone. I expect that many of these titles will never be pressed again.

Twilight Time Link

[Mark Ogden]

It's a shame that Twilight Time is going down, they came up with some interesting and obscure titles, and their packaging and annotation was nice. But I have to say that their transfer quality was always pretty mediocre. I have a handful of their Blu Rays and it seemed to me that all they were doing was taking an interpositive and doing a one-light, one-pass tech transfer, and that was it. I've never seen any serious attempt at color grading on any of their titles. I actually hung onto my old DVD of Anne of a Thousand Days because I think it looks better. Sorry to see a player leave and I appreciate the effort, but just having a title in HD is no great deal if it was struck from the cheapest transfer you could afford.

[Jesse Skeen]

Their Blu-Ray of Talk Radio looks like a standard-def master. Never seen a Blu-Ray that bad looking.

They had an interesting business model, the limited nature of it made me pre-order titles that I really wanted just to make sure I got them at all. Was disgusted that Sony, the main company behind the friggin' Blu-Ray format, was licensing out some of their titles to them on that limited model when they should have been putting them out themselves to help the format instead of promoting that digital crap over it. They had a lot of titles that weren't even obscure, like Sleepless in Seattle which was an early prototype DVD and one of the first titles out on that format.

[Mark Ogden]

Now that interest in physical optical media is waning, the studios only want to release current titles, and those library titles that are more-or-less evergreens, The Wizard of OZ or Gone With The Wind, for instance. They would rather license out back catalog titles to niche players. This was the business model for Twilight Time, also Olive Films (which is just barely hanging on), Shout Factory/Rhino/Scream Factory, Anchor Bay, Blue Underground, et. al. I very much appreciate these guys, they can reunite you with some really obscure films that the original studios don't want to bother with and are very happy to license out.

The technical quality varies on this stuff. My experience is that Olive and the Rhino labels are very good, Anchor Bay was so-so, and Twilight Time, as I mentioned, was pretty mundane. I was delighted when they announced that Zardoz, a guilty pleasure title if ever there was one, was coming to Blu Ray. But again, it's one of the most lackluster transfers I've ever seen, clearly a one-pass-thru-the scanner job. As I mentioned above with another film, I'm keeping my old Fox Home Video DVD. It's standard definition, but apart from that it just looks better than the Twilight Time Blu. They had some good titles, though, including a lot of OK transfers of Woody Allen back catalog.