Gangs of New York Blu-ray Gets Video Overhaul

Quietly, without any official announcement or even a press release, Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment released yesterday a remastered Blu-ray edition of the Martin Scorsese movie Gangs of New York. Pending a full analysis, blu-ray.com reviewer Kenneth Brown confirms that this edition offers a "substantial improvement" in video quality over the 2008 release.


Left to right: the remastered edition and the first edition of Gangs of New York

The remastered edition can be told from the first one by looking for the following:

• "Miramax award-winning collection" banner at the top
• Black frame around smaller cover picture
• "All-new digital restoration" sticker
• Audio options English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 and Spanish Dolby Digital 2.0

With regard to the video quality, a full review will be posted to the site soon. In the meantime, Kenneth Brown has sent the following advance preview:

The newly remastered release of Gangs of New York represents such a substantial improvement over the previously released Blu-ray misfire that filmfans and videophiles will be left with little to nothing to complain about. Everything about the transfer looks amazing, and all of the problems that plagued Disney's first release are nowhere to be found. Colors, contrast, black levels, and fine detail are all excellent, the presentation is free of digital anomalies, edge enhancement has been kept to a bare minimum, and the film looks fantastic.

So to sum up recent developments: two movies directed by the great Martin Scorsese (GoodFellas and Gangs of New York) are being rereleased on Blu-ray within weeks of each other. One of them comes in a highly-publicized 20th Anniversary edition but offers no improvement in audio/video presentation (see blu-ray.com, February 1), and the other gets a low-profile rerelease but improves the picture quality massively. To quote Morpheus: fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.