Looks like I'll be sending out Summer Hours and Walkabout. I'll be doing some more recon on the titles affected by actually playing them.

So they can replace Pierrot Le Fou even though it has been out of print fir a while now?

Hopefully this does not become a wide fiasco, and further convincing people to not buy bluray (or optical discs in general).

sooooooo....

what type of packaging do we mail the discs in?

DVD padded envelope. I'll be doing mine that way.

I just sent Jon an email to confirm that I will receive a replacement disc if I send this one in before I include it with the others that have problems.

My present conundrum is whether or not to send in the listed discs that I own, which presently are playable. Without any way to identify if a disc is part of the "bad pressing," my main fear is that I might have a bad disc that simply hasn't turned yet.

Walkabout is completely bronzed and unplayable.

M is not really bronzed, but you can see some cloudiness around the outer edge of the disc and my PS3 could not play it 2 out of 3 times. The one time the disc loaded, Chapter 1 would not play, it skipped to Chapter 2, then froze.

The Pierrot Le Fou disc looks fine, but freezes up during Chapter 14 around the 01:01:05 mark.

So, I'm weighing whether or not to send in Howards End, The Seventh Seal, and Paris, Texas even though I was able to skip through each of them lest they simply "turn" sooner rather than later. I'd hate to wait and then have them turn at a point when they may be OOP.

Any one else sending in discs "to play it safe?"

For what it's worth here are the purchase dates for each:

Pierrot Le Fou - 10/6/09 (released 9/22/09)
Walkabout - 5/18/10 (released 5/18/10)
M - 5/24/10 (released 5/10/10)
The Seventh Seal - 7/22/09 (released 6/16/09)
Howards End - 11/12/09 (released 11/3/09)
Paris, Texas - 7/13/10 (released 1/26/10)

They have padded envelopes For DVDs? And then what we get reimbursed for shipping?

no. It'll cost you a few dollars tops to send just the discs out. Criterion will obviously cover the shipping for the replacements, as they'll likely put them in some form of protective sleeves.

Well, just checked my copy of "M" - Bronze City here I am. Haven't checked to see if I have any play issues yet but this is disappointing.

Are International customers out of luck in this exchange program? That post doesn't mention anything about us. I have a few that I need to replace including Pierrot Le Fou.

So my Paris,Texas and Days of Heaven looks fine... don't see any bronzing whatsoever. Am I fine, or could it start bronzing now that I've unsealed them?

Play it just to be sure. I had a new never watched copy of Che that looked fine but was defective when I started playing it.

FYI, I had zero issues playing my copy of Days of Heaven that I unsealed a few days ago.

Interesting that Yojimbo and Sanjuro are not on the replacement program list yet. You would think they would know all titles that were produced by the bad site and have them all on the program at once. No reason to play the "If we learn that other titles are similarly defective" game if they know the root cause.

Mark me down as another person with a copy of Walkabout that is now defective. I couldn't even get the menu to come up. I hate feeling like I have a bunch of movies that are ticking time bombs. Ugh.

I need to check the rest of my discs. The best thing to do would be just to fast-forward through the whole thing? Would that work?

Probably the most definitive way of checking, would be to extract the bluray disc's undecrypted iso in its entirety on the computer. If any bad sectors are encountered, most likely the disc is at the end of its useful life.

I'm in the habit of doing this for every new dvd/bluray disc I purchase. Also once in awhile, I'll do it for some older discs I have (chosen semi-randomly).


I do this largely out of ocd based paranoia over bad sectors. One of the first dvds I purchased back in the late-1990's, was defective where it froze within 20 minutes into the movie. This is the main reason why I never collected large quantities of dvds/blurays back in the 2000's decade.

UPDATE: One player wouldn't load the disc. The second one loaded but skipped throughout the first 9 chapters.

God, I have some which haven't even been opened yet which I have to check now! Major mistake, but kudos to Criterion for being manful and fixing it.

(As a tangential aside).

Back in the day I knew myself well enough to know that my ocd compulsive collecting/hoarding could go into overdrive, and (in principle) fall into a pattern of buying a lot of dvds without opening up the packaging.

But it was after one of my first dvd purchases turning out to be a defective disc with bad sectors (back in the late 1990's), which very much short circuited any potential interest I had in a dvd collecting hobby at the time. (In hindsight, this may very well have been a "blessing in disguise").

Compounding this, were other aspects of my ocd mentality (ie. perfectionism, etc ..) which would have demanded that my dvd discs be in perfect working order with no bad sectors. But back in the late-1990's I had no idea how to go about checking for bad sectors, other than watching through every dvd disc from start to finish and all the "extras". It would have been a major "chore" watching through tons of crappy movies from start to finish. I wouldn't have it that way.


Fast forward to the present day, the main reason my ocd collecting/hoarding went into overdrive on dvds/blurays, is because I found out it's very easy to check for bad sectors on dvd/bluray discs. This is the main reason why I don't have any "unopened" dvds or blurays. (As soon as I get home from the store, I check every newly purchased dvd/bluray disc thoroughly for bad sectors using the computer).

Yes. Why take the chance?

This is a possibility. (Seems I'm not the only one with sealed Criterion Blu-rays!) Seriously, although not airtight, the shrinkwrap did prevent air and moisture from getting at your disc. Now open, the process may start or accelerate.

No. You need to play the disc. FF may allow errors to be skipped over, at least that's what others have said on blu-ray.com forums. I've been playing all discs identified as problematic, although I have not gone into the special features.

It seem some of the Well GO USA disc are having the same issue too. I had an unopened copy of IP Man 2 and it has the bronzing problem. I am not sure opening them matters at all.

Good to know. I'd rather they go bad now if they're going to go bad. I can't see this replacement program lasting forever.

I lived through the days of Laser rot....this is like a bad flashback

Criterion is not saying much.Posted in another forum they do not have any of these OOP tittles left.
Kind of sucks,might be best to call them if you have one of these bad OOP tittles.
I own Pierrot Le Fou and Howards End.They look okay,but I still need to
watch them to make sure.

I was late to the blu party, so thankfully most of my discs are the later pressings. Of the ones I do own in the 'danger range', my affected discs are:

- Walkabout
- Wages of Fear
- Sanjuro

Yojimbo and Howards End look ok, but if they are offering replacements, I'd certainly take them. That said, for OP titles, I'll be making absolutely sure they are, in fact, replacing anything I send them, especially if they play fine right now.

Just to be clear, is this 'bronzing?' It looks a bit more severe than some of the other pics I've seen:



That's Sanjuro, my most affected disc, but the other two have the same square pattern, just not quite as dark

Wow, I have never seen one that looked like that yet. Most seem to have a Gold/Bronze tint starting from the outside towards the center. It seems to be darker on the outside portion.