The French branch of Warner Home Video has announced that, on May 18, it will re-release Stanley Kubrick's
A Clockwork Orange in a 40-Anniversary, 2-Disk Digibook Blu-ray edition. Just a few days earlier, the film be projected digitally at the Cannes Film Festival. There is no information about a US release at the moment.
To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the start of the long-standing relationship between Warner Bros and Kubrick, seven of his movies will be digitally projected in theaters across France starting June 1:
Lolita, 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, The Shining (in its US version, never released before in French cinemas),
Full Metal Jacket and
Eyes Wide Shut.
Additionally, the French Cinémathèque will host an exhibition on Stanley Kubrick, with an area of over 10,000 square feet and displaying screenplays, correspondence, research documents, on-set photographs, costumes and props, as well as in-depth documentation on Kubrick's unfinished projects, such as his
Napoleon.
Update
A Spanish site has posted the first image of the upcoming 40th Anniversary edition. Confirming the reports from HD Numérique, it will indeed be a two-disc Digibook edition. Disc 2 is also a Blu-ray and visibly includes two documentaries:
Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures (previously available only on DVD) and
O Lucky Malcolm (already available on the first edition of
A Clockwork Orange).
The fact that a documentary is being shifted to another disc indicates that in this case WHV won't simply reuse the existing first-edition disc and slap a second bonus disc to create a special edition, like it did recently with
GoodFellas: 20th Anniversary Edition (see Blu-ray.com,
February 1, 2010).
Update 2
HD Numérique has removed any mention of a new digital restoration being used for the Cannes screening. Therefore, the transfer projected will be probably the same already used for the 2007 Blu-ray.