Arrow reached their goal with 38 days to go.

Had no idea this was going on. Good for Arrow!

Wow, terrible. They need to fund-raise to open up a location in the US?

I've never paid too much attention to Arrow since I'm not region free but they seem to have released a lot of good titles. I'm interested in seeing what they can bring us.

Well, they would have to be Region Free or Region A, and it does not seem like they have the money to out-buy Shout or even Twilight Time if they can't even afford to open an office in the US without crowdfunding....so maybe some super D Grade films?

I did shoot an amazing 6 minute presentation Of Mice and Men while in High School that I could license to them for $35.

They are putting up a lot of their own money. Unlike TT and Shout, they actually spend money on restorations. Crowd funding was one way for them to gauge interest in the US and make sure that there is no gap in releases after the initial batch of releases. I also think that Arrow might be getting a bunch of Universal titles but that is only speculation on my part.

I welcome Arrow Video to America but they are very, very late to the game. Most of the better horror/cult films have already been licensed out in America by Scream, Raro, Kino, etc. The stuff they will have to release simply won't sell that well, resulting in poor business.

I'm not a big fan of their suggested list price for the American market. A $40 list price is vastly overpriced for their kind of genre fare. Criterion only gets away with it because they regularly dump their lesser discs at $15 retail through special sales such as Barnes & Noble.

I presume they are scared if their American BDs are priced cheaper than their UK editions, it will cannibalize their UK sales.

By the time they launch a U.S. office I'd be curious if they plan on selling the discs online only. No way would they get any of them in Best Buy or Target with the reduced footprint discs already have.

Yeah, I'm really not sure what they can offer here that we couldn't get from other niche outlets.

That is true I guess. Scream Factory and Kino have covered quite a few of the big name titles already so while there are still some titles out there without a proper Blu-ray release its coming down to more obscure titles, which let's face it the titles released by companies like Scream and Kino are pretty much niche titles to begin with.

We'll have to see what titles they can acquire but their quality is what sets them apart. They have more in common with Criterion than they do with Scream Factory or Twilight Time.

I'm pretty sure they have done their market research. And out of their first 4 announcements are good news indeed. Restored straight from the OCN too.

If they had, they wouldn't be begging for money for office chairs.

Ignorance is bliss, my friend.

I presume the fundraising is more about publicity in the American market than anything else. They just sold the idea they needed money as an excuse to fans.

Again, they are crowdfunding for money. Arrow has been around long enough to where if they can't judge the market and it requires us to send them money (in hopes of getting discs for the next 10 years, LOL), something is probably not going very well.

So no, I won't pre-buy something so I can pay for someones office chair.

I like Arrows releases (well, I did when they were doing the cool packaging like Day and Dawn of the Dead, I have not purchased a single disc in their cheaper quality packaging), but asking for money just seems sad. If Twilight Time can do it, Arrow should have no problem.

Logistics. Arrow is based in the UK and Shout/Scream and TT are U.S. based. Also, the grand rule of business is to use other people's money.

Ignorance is still bliss, no longer my friend.

If your point is that prepaying for goods is risky, fine that's understandable. And that's what all the funding perks are, just at different levels of risk and corresponding discount.

But you seem to be conflating that with some notion of use of the funds which makes no sense because sale proceeds, whether they are prepayments or not, can be used for what Arrow want. They can, as they have said, use it for buying licenses to more titles, restore more titles, restore in 4k instead of 2k etc, or as you say if you dont believe them, use them to buy office chairs.

By way of example, if they had not done this, but simply put up pre-orders via their website for their 4 announced titles in the way they do in the UK currently, they could have used the funds from any of those pre-sales to buy office chairs or to buy licenses or to cover restoring costs etc. The prepayment is for goods not for use of the funds.

Arrow's office chairs before the pledge and after....ummmmmmmm

Well come to think of it, that's basically a few dozen Criterions or one Twilight Time Limited Edition release. So, the loss won't be so bad.

An American presence would be fabulous. I'm slowly becoming a regular customer of theirs because of their quality releases, not to mention the care given for those booklets. Those booklets are a real treat to read.

Maybe they'll fix Shivers for the U.S. release? Hope springs eternal.

I watched Blind Woman's Curse yesterday and it had the trailers for the Stray Cat Rock set and it looked great. It reminded me of the new wave films of France/USA but their Japanese counterparts, so I wanted to see if they were available to import and they are not due to it being a 2,000 print run. It's OOP.

I asked Arrow Films and they said that the USA banner of Arrow will be releasing the set in July and it will be limited to 3,000 pieces.

It's not strictly bare bones like the UK edition was:

Special Edition Contents:
Limited Edition Blu-ray (3000 copies only)
High Definition Blu-ray (1080p) and Standard Definition DVD presentation of all five films in the Stray Cat Rock series
Original Mono audio (uncompressed PCM on the Blu-rays)
New English subtitle translation of all five films
Interview with Yasuharu Hasebe, director of Delinquent Girl Boss, Sex Hunter, and Machine Animal
Interview with actor Tatsuya Fuji, star of all five films
Interview with actor Yoshio Harada, star of Beat ’71
Original Trailers
Collector’s booklet featuring new writing on the films by Japanese cinema expert Jasper Sharp


http://www.dvdactive.com/news/releas...-releases.html

Anyways, I just saved a bunch of money by not buying it rom Ebay.

The Stray Cat Rock set is awesome. I'm going to have to sell mine since I'll be getting the U.S. version.

Stray Cat Rock is now $49.99 on Amazon. Great price!