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A STITCH IN TIME…
MAD ABOUT BRIDGET
MARCHING ON…
…DANNY’S ON THE CHISEL AGAIN
KITCHEN SINK DRAMA
SHOWGIRL T-SHORT COMP REMINDER
FORBIDDEN WORLDS FESTIVAL BACK TO VHS ERA
DARLING BE HOME SOON…
…FIVE STARS AS 4K READIES FOR RELEASE
DARKNESS REIGNS IN 4K
GOLDEN DEAL FOR ARROW…
…WOO-HOO! ASIAN CLASSICS HEAD TO UK…
…ARROW ADDS TO SLATE WITH AUGUST TITLES
POWERHOUSE OFFERS JUSTICE FOR ALL…
WARNER READIES 4K RELEASES
PIRATE RAIDED
SUPPORT THE RAYGUN
TRAILERS OF THE WEEK 
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It was a good week for…
Lilo & Stitch, the riches-to-even greater riches franchise, currently dominating at cinemas worldwide, as well as another long0running franchise, MissionL Impossible, as The `final reckoning is also earning big bucks…
It was a bad week for… the pirate arrested in Wales, site shuttered and investigations continuing…
We have been watching… Loads more for our Film Stories review, as well as catching some films at the Forbidden Worlds Film Festival (see below) and watching the forthcoming Genesis P-Orridge doc S/he Is Still Her/e…
Lilo & Stitch is the franchise that refuses to die – some 22 year after the first animated adventure was released on DVD, it has returned to the top of the box office charts, sticking at number one for the second week running, its £6 million plus haul at the weekend and its run during half-term week now meaning its total receipts at UK cinemas have topped the £25 million mark. The franchise clearly appeals to families and young’uns, but, according to Disney executives, also resonates with Gen Z – its popularity has grown in the past decade or so, and positively blown up in the past couple of years, driven by an excellent licensing programme and some wonderful toys. Lilo & Stitch’s live action outing is the third highest-grossing film of the year – bested only by Bridget Jones’ latest outing, Mad About The Boy, and A Minecraft `Movie. Meanwhile, looking set to move into fourth spot in the year’s highest grossers is the final Mission: Impossible outing, The Final Reckoning, which has earned more than £17 million in its two weeks on release…
Of course the aforementioned Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy is hitting the shelves this week on physical media following its £46 million plus theatrical run and subsequent home premiere release, continuing Universal and physical media partner Spirit’s strong start to the new year and the new partnership between the two. The film lands with a raft of extras, including deleted scenes and a trio of featurettes, including Back to Bridget, in which Renée Zellweger and cast and crew talk about the character’s return; Bridget 4.0, a look at the new Bridget; and Mad About the Boys, studying Jones’ new fellas…
Also landing in stores this week is Marching Powder, which sees a return for home entertainment favourite and a bona fide video star in the shape of Danny Dyer. He’s back with director Nick Love – the pair collaborated on Football Factory, one of the biggest phenomena of the DVD era – for this comedy drama looking at Jack Jones, the kind of character Love and Dyer’s earlier work featured, with Jones (Dyer) at a crossroads in his life. Its released by fledgling distribution and production company True Brit Entertainment, via Elevation, and the company’s Chris Besseling told The Raygun: “With £3.1m at the UK and Irish box office, MARCHING POWDER’s release reflects a growing demand from audiences to see original British stories on the big screen regardless of budget. Costing less than £1.6m net to make, this is a remarkable achievement. The film delivered broad theatrical appeal stretching far beyond the core 35+ male fanbase of Nick Love and Danny Dyer’s previous collaborations The Football Factory and The Business – films that ultimately found their cult success during their Home Entertainment window. With 45 per cent of cinema attendees over MARCHING POWDER’s opening weekend being female, the film clearly cut through beyond the heavily male-skewed Football Factory faithful to Danny’s significant and distinctively different older female fanbase that he has garnered off the back of recent TV hits including Rivals, Mr. Big Stuff and Eastenders.
Besseling continued: “In addition to the male-skewed audience that drove Danny and Nick’s previous films to be DVD gold back in the day, Danny is now a national treasure adored on TV screens by a much broader audience, offering huge potential for MARCHING POWDER’s Home Entertainment release. With a very strong box office conversion rate of 0.42 per cent, cumulative PEST sales after four weeks totalled over 12,700, ranking the film as the second best-converting title amongst films with a premium release since January 2024 within a box office bracket of £2m-£6m. With a very positive premium digital release window, the film is extremely well set up for the physical and standard digital release at a lower price-point.”
Also out on Monday, and following hot on the heels of last week’s Picturehouse release of The Last Showgirl, comes another from the exhibitor and distributor, with the release of La Cocina from Alonso Ruizpalacios, the director who has recently helmed the final episodes of the current season of Disney+ Star Wars hit Andor. Comment on the film came from Picturehouse’s Alice Werdine who said: “We're thrilled to be releasing Alonso Ruizpalacios' LA COCINA on Blu-Ray this week. A stylish, powerful and exhilarating love story set against the lunch rush of a Times Square kitchen, this is a contemporary tale of belonging based on the acclaimed stage play by Arnold Wesker. Led by incredible performances by Rooney Mara and Raúl Briones, LA COCINA is a breathtaking piece of cinema that is as intense as it is heartfelt.”
And while we’re on Picturehouse, we’ve been asked to point out the figures we gave for UK box office for The Last Showgirl were a little out of date – the film has taken more than £1 million at UK cinemas rather than the £700,000 we quoted. And also on The Last Showgirl, a reminder we’ve got a couple of lovely t-shirts to give away and we’re giving you one more chance to get your hands on them. The tees feature the logo of the club that dancer Shelly (Pamela Anderson) and her pals regularly strut their stuff at, Le Razzle Dazzle. It’s a lovely piece of kit, we’ve been sporting ours around the streets of north London recently (you can see them here https://www.picturehouses.com/blog/the-last-showgirl-limited-edition-t-shirt)). All you have to do to be in with a chance of winning a copy is email tim@theraygun.co.uk with win in the subject line, specifying what size you want. First two out of the hat will win a t-shirt and a Blu-ray. Good luck… To the revived Bristol Megascreen – a giant IMAX cinema aligned to the city’s Aquarium, which was over the weekend playing host to the Forbidden Worlds Film Festival, arguably the most home entertainment friendly film fest in the world, as it aims to replicate the glorious days of genre-filled rental stores but on a giant screen. The team from 20th Century Flicks led by owner Dave Taylor have been instrumental in the festival’s formation – he was the one who suggested utilising the abandoned venue for events such as this, and has picked up projectionist skills to help screen films there. It puts the store, one of the last remaining rental outlets in the UK, at the centre of the city’s independent film activity and cements its place in the community. The festival brought over uber-producer Gail Anne Hurd, awarding her legend status and interviewing her ahead of the screening of some of her most well known works among genre fans, including Aliens and the ever excellent Tremors. The event also saw UK premieres on the big screen for under-seen classics – one of those was for Below, a Brit-friendly ghost story set on a submarine during the Second World War. As founder Timon Singh told us at The Raygun recently:“Basically we're trying to recreate the video shop experience, but on the biggest screen in the city. Weird titles you might have seen in the video shop or on TV growing up, that aren't readily available on streamers today, and now not just on the big screen - but an IMAX screen.”
Meanwhile, we mentioned last week that we’d been to see the 60th anniversary restoration of Darling, the Julie Christie starrer that shocked the UK on its original release in 1965. The screening, held at the Charlotte Street Hotel in London’s Fitzrovia, was one of a clutch put together by Studiocanal with the help of drinks company Campari (the brand is mentioned in the film, so was a natural fit) ahead of its theatrical re-release last week, which was accompanied by glowing reviews and reappraisals from the nationals, and a subsequent 4K and Blu-ray release on June 16. The restoration is masterful, the film looked clean and crisp and Swinging London has rarely looked better. And, as The Times noted in its five star review: “Up there with Blow-Up and Alfie as the definitive Swinging London movie, this Julie Christie breakout has somehow acquired more gravitas over time than those two… The Oscar-winning screenplay from Frederic Raphael is bleakly satirical and depicts the navel-gazing London media set with withering contempt… The Oscar-winning central performance from Christie, who was 24 when filming took place, is monumental and pushes the film to stark philosophical places.”
Comment on the release of Darling came from Studiocanal’s Alison Arber, who said: “Our brand new 4K restoration of 60s classic DARLING premiered on the beach at Cannes this year in true style. We also put on some special screenings for critics and fans to enjoy the film before release, sponsored by our friends at Campari. Icon Julie Christie won an Oscar for her role as Diana, directed by John Schlesinger, with wonderful supporting turns from Dirk Bogarde and Laurence Harvey. This new restoration gives fans the chance to own the film on UHD with a 64-page booklet packed full of brand-new essays.”
Those with a long memory stretching back to before the advent of DVD will remember the seismic impact that the films of John Woo had on the video market on these shores, as big world cinema companies such as Palace and then Tartan, as well as Asian specialists such as Eastern Heroes and Made In Hong Kong brought the works of Woo to a wider audience before the director went to Hollywood, as well as product from stars such as Chow Yun-fat and associated South East Asian films to VHS, helping make action cinema from far-flung corners of the globe a more mainstream opposition in the UK. Woo’s works and similar outings have not necessarily got the treatment they’re crying out for on Blu-ray in this country, but this is set to change from next year after Arrow – a perfect home for Woo’s wonderful cinema – inked a deal with US operation Shout! Studios to release 156 titles from the legendary Golden Princess library in this country. The deal will take in digital and Arrow’s trademark limited edition releases of key titles, and it takes in such Woo gems as Hard Boiled, A Better Tomorrow and A Better Tomorrow II, The Killer, Once A Thief and Bullet In The Head. It also includes “seminal works” from Woo’s action muse Chow Yun-fat in City On Fire, Prison On Fire, Full Contact and Peace Hotel, with further HK classics such as A Chinese Ghost Story, Tiger On The Beat, Peking Opera Blues, Aces Go Places and Web Of Deception. It marks UK firsts for many of these titles, with others long out of print, never having received Blu-ray releases. The announcement noted: “Arrow is targeting 2026 for the first wave of titles in the deal and will bring select titles and fan favourites back to the big screen in the UK as part of their strategy.”
Comment on the deal came from Arrow’s Louise Buckler who said: “We are so honoured to be working with the team at Shout! Studios to bring over 150 titles from the Golden Princess library to UK fans. We’ve already seen great interest on bringing select titles to the big screen from UK exhibition since the news was revealed via Screen Daily so watch this space for more developments on these titles as things progress. We are huge fans of many of these titles here at Arrow and can’t wait to do these titles justice with definitive UK releases.”
The deal was negotiated by Cliff MacMillan at Arrow Films and Mark Balsam at Shout! Studios and follows Shout! Studios’ deal with Golden Princess parent Kowloon Development Company at the start of the year to give it worldwide rights to the catalogue, which had been unavailable for some time. At the time, Shout! Studios Jordan Fields said; “This is a big one. Golden Princess sits alongside Shaw Brothers and Golden Harvest in the pantheon of Hong Kong cinema, but unlike the other two, the Golden Princess library has been dormant for decades outside of Asia. Its fingerprints are all over modern action and crime genres, though, so we have big plans to reintroduce these fabled titles to the rest of the world, complementing Shout!’s growing catalog of revered Asian films.” Kowloon’s Dickson Lai added: “The films in the Golden Princess Library are akin to the sword in the stone. Shout! is the entity capable of unlocking its potential. As an organisation, we believe that the right partnership can unlock untapped potential and achieve legendary success.”
Meanwhile, Friday May 30, the last of the month, saw Arrow announcing its next batch of titles, taking to social media to reveal the releases due in August. Comment came from Louise Buckler, again, who said: “We revealed our August lineup today across our social accounts to a great reception for our fanbase. First up is VHS rental classic ENEMY TERRITORY with a brand new restoration from the original 35mm negative, Michael Mann’s Neo-noir gem THIEF gets the 4K UHD treatment, Don Siegel’s Western THE SHOOTIST arrives on UK shores, the second release in our Shudder deal arrives in the form of feminist coming-of-age serial killer chiller PERPETRATOR from Jennifer Reeder which comes stacked with special features, Wolfgang Petersen’s noughties disaster epic POSEIDON arrives on 4K UHD for the first time ever and we cap off the month up with THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE: THE BEGINNING on 4K UHD presented its original Theatrical Version and the extended Uncut Version for the first time on 4K Ultra HD.”
More forthcoming product news and also announcing recently has been Powerhouse and its excellent Indicator series, with four new additions to its ever-expanding library due in August. The quartet includes Bette Davis in the Blu-ray premiere of Storm Center; Otto Preminger’s Francoise Sagan adaptation Bonjour Tristesse, starring David Niven, Deborah Kerr and Jean Seberg; Lee J Cobb in The Liberation of LB Jones and Al Pacino in And Justice For All. Comment on the releases came from Powerhouse’s Sam Dunn, who said: “We're absolutely thrilled to be releasing Blu-ray premieres of these incredible, powerful films. Starring an impressive line-up of some of the most iconic actors of their time - including Bette Davis, Deborah Kerr, David Niven, Jean Seberg, Lee J Cobb, Roscoe Lee Browne, and Al Pacino - and helmed by a number of cinema's most celebrated filmmakers - including Otto Preminger and William Wyler - this incendiary quartet deals with a range of red-hot topics that are as urgent and relevant now as they ever were: freedom of speech; venal self-interest; institutional racism; and legal injustice. As always, each of these strictly Limited Editions comes packaged with newly produced booklets and an array of essential extra features.”
Meanwhile, a few forthcoming Warner releases on the way in 4K… two of which have been announced over the past week or so. First up is Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street, the musical-cum-thriller starring Helena Bonham Carter and Johnny Depp, both under the watchful eye of director Tim Burton, with the 4K, due on July 7, containing a raft of extras. On the same date comes the classic David Fincher serial killer tale Zodiac, available in 4K in two versions, including the original and director’s cut, and two commentaries, one with the director, the second with Jake Gyllenhaal, Robert Downey Jr., producer Brad Fischer, James Vanderbilt and James Ellroy. The aforementioned brace join Lethal Weapon, the Mel Gibson and Danny Glover mismatched buddy cop movie that launched a thousand rent-a-likes after its 1987 release, as well as a franchise. The title – both the original and the 2000 director’s cut on the same package including brand new extras looking at late director Richard Donner as well as the chemistry between its leads – is released on 4K UHD, 4K UHD SteelBook and as a 4K UHD collector's edition on June 23.
Interesting announcement from the City Of London police’s specialist anti-piracy, anti-counterfeiting and pro-copyright arm PIPCU, which announced last week that, working with the giant studio and distributor trade organisation the MPA swooped on a suspected pirate. The raid on the unnamed 47-year-old man at his his home in Penmaenmawr, Wales, and is currently investigating the leaking of Hollywood blockbusters online and copyright offences. The statement about the raid noted: “He is suspected to have obtained thousands of films, television series and songs without the necessary licence or permissions from the copyright owners and then distributed them through a file sharing torrent site. The content included two recent Hollywood films that were leaked before their official release dates.” Detective Constable Jason Theobald, from the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) said: “This operation serves as a warning to anyone thinking of uploading copyrighted material to pirate sites. This is a crime that diverts funds away from the creative industries, money that not only supports artists, but thousands of technical and support staff working in this sector. It’s estimated that this type of criminal activity contributes to around 86,000 job losses each year alone. PIPCU is committed to working with partners, nationally and internationally, to take action against those involved.” Senior EVP and global general counsel for the MPA Karyn Temple added: “This operation stands as a powerful testament to the impact of close collaboration between law enforcement, the creative sector, and industry partners. We commend PIPCU for their leadership and dedication—their unique role in tackling intellectual property crime is essential in today’s digital age. Together, we are delivering meaningful results in the fight against piracy. As technology continues to evolve, so do the threats to creative content. This decisive enforcement action reinforces the message that piracy is not a victimless crime—it damages creators, disrupts legitimate businesses, and endangers consumers. We are proud to stand with PIPCU and our partners to protect creative industries and ensure audiences around the world can enjoy stories in a safe, legal, and secure way.”
 Ballerina buses, all over the country…
 The Raygun, is 15 years old and continues to report on the home entertainment industry and its ever-changing face. To ensure we can continue to bring you the latest news, opinion and analysis from a business we love and care passionately about, you can support our independent journalism by donating to us via Ko-fi… Thank you.
TRAILERS OF THE WEEK
The name of the doctor, not the monster…
We’re up to 1930…
From the page to the big screen… Not for the faint-hearted…
Upgrade…
Due from Disney…https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlCLAFzLM3k
THE OBLIGATORY GDPR BIT
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