Great news for Hong Kong cinema fans! Shout! has acquired worldwide rights (excluding select Asian territories) to the Golden Princess movie library, which consists of 156 Hong Kong cinema classics, many of which have been MIA from the market for years.
Titles included with the deal include Hard Boiled, The Killer, the complete A Better Tomorrow trilogy, Bullet in the Head and Once a Thief. The library also boasts Ringo Lam’s City on Fire, Prison on Fire and its sequel; Eric Tsang’s Aces Go Places; Tsui’s Peking Opera Blues; Tony Ching’s Chinese Ghost Story trilogy; and additional hits like Wai Ka-fai’s Peace Hotel, Andrew Kam and Johnnie To’s The Big Heat and Alex Law’s Now You See It, Now You Don’t (via Variety).
We’ll keep you updated as detailed emerge. Until then, here’s some selected Trailers for you to feast on:
Now we just need Shaolin Soccer and the uncut Rumble in the Bronx, Hero, and Grandmaster back, and we can party like it’s 1986.
Golden princess got bought by an Indian society, then…ain’t it now linked to Di$ney’s evil empire?
Whatever, no Region B, no care.
This is extremely exciting. Thats quite a collection of films they’ve got and it will be great to finally have legit releases with properly translated subtitles and great picture and sound.
The Big Heat is a great one. It’s one of the few times Waise Lee was a good guy, and it had that gritty flavor going for it.
This is massive news for collectors. Hopefully Shout has access to brand new 4k scans of the original negatives and produce the definitive releases of all these classics. They all need to be to the same level of quality as the official Fortune Star 4k release of A Better Tomorrow and not the AI upscale German bootleg blurays of The Killer, Bullet in the Head and Prison on Fire or the crappy Fortune Star HK Blurays of the Chinese Ghost Story Trilogy. I’m cautiously optimistic but would much prefer Eureka or Arrow get their hands on these movies.
Unfortunately, they’re also hiring a well-known Bey Logan defender to work on these releases as well: https://forum.blu-ray.com/showpost.php?p=22788454&postcount=119
Dude went on a meltdown over people criticizing 88 Films for originally hiring him and even tried to throw another boutique label under the bus to make him look good, to where they had to debunk him: https://forum.blu-ray.com/showpost.php?p=20542612&postcount=21968 https://web.archive.org/web/20221015015029/https://forum.blu-ray.com/showpost.php?p=20543317&postcount=21978 https://x.com/VinegarSyndrome/status/1580642256150667264