Title: The Passenger
Starring: Jack Nicholson
Released: 14th March 2006
SRP: $24.96

Further Details:
Sony Pictures Home Entertainment has announced a new release of The Passenger which stars Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider. Originally released in 1975, the film is a suspenseful and haunting portrait of a drained journalist whose deliverance is an identity exchange with a dead man. The disc will be available to own from the 14th March, priced at around $24.96. Extras on this one will include an audio commentary with Jack Nicholson, a second commentary with Wim Wenders (director of Paris, Texas & Wings of Desire), An Evening at the Academy Featurette, and an interview with writer Mark Peploe and Maria Schneide. We've attached a small shot of the official region one package artwork below:

Nicholson was unhappy with all suitors for a theatrical and subsequent DVD release until discussions began with Sony Pictures Classics in early 2003, with a deal finalized in May 2004. * * * * But nothing is ever simple with The Passenger. Sony Classics was originally intending to release Antonioni’s hated MGM edition. As part of the research for this essay for Cinema Scope, I came across Antonioni’s unqualified condemning statement (on page 218 of the edited compilation of the director’s writings and interviews, The Architecture of Vision) and passed it along to Michael Barker, co-President of Sony Classics and Richard Pena, director of the New York Film Film Festival, where the film is receiving a special presentation. The evidence, fortunately, was convincing enough for Sony Classics to pull the MGM version and instead release the longer version, which will retain the title of The Passenger. (These changes won’t affect the scheduled Los Angeles premiere in mid-September and the New York Film Festival screening prior to release.) That there has been no apparent effort to search for the 20-odd minutes’ worth of material (described vividly by Antonioni in The Architecture of Vision, in a chapter tellingly titled “The Passenger that you didn’t see”) which made up the longer version before the final excisions is clearly a tragedy—for the moment at least. Antonioni, turning 93 on September 29, remains vital and active, as does the work to restore and maintain his oeuvre—to say nothing of the vigorous movement in film archival restoration and (albeit sometimes controversial) projects to “reconstruct” previously trimmed films, from Touch of Evil (1958) to The Big Red One (1980). For a film about a man seeking to find another self, it should be possible to find this other Passenger, and bring its own history back full circle.