Reaching A Broad Audience
It takes a special TV programme to dominate the weekend’s press coverage. And generally, the kind of programme that will get reviewed everywhere, is either a moody Scandinavian detective series, or an epic HBO tale. Broadchurch is neither of those, and yet it still managed to get reviewed everywhere, as our weekly round up of [...]
Click here for more >Mob Rules
A group of commuters at one of the country’s biggest train stations spontaneously burst into song… Buskers clad in French revolutionary-era peasant garb start belting out songs from a musical… Meanwhile, in stores around the country, HMV staff and their customers also join in the singalong fun… All these happeningswere linked to the event-sized launch [...]
Click here for more >Les Is More
After its barnstorming theatrical performance, the arrival of Les Miserables on DVD was bound to be an all-singing all-dancing affair and, as our weekly round up of home entertainment coverage in the press indicates, it was warmly greeted by newspapers everywhere. The musical adaptation was not only everywhere, but it also earned good notices almost [...]
Click here for more >Eureka’s Check-mate
Eureka is keeping itself busy. Not content with signing up milestone movies from cinema history for its Masters Of Cinema imprint, as well as inking deals with the likes of Universal to give a touch of its MoC magic to major studio fare, as well as releasing other titles, its own and its distributed labels, [...]
Click here for more >England Expects
The phrase game-changer is bandied an awful lot around our business, particularly when it comes to feature film releases. It’s got to a stage where we at The Raygun will no longer use it to describe any release that way, just to avoid the continued over-egging of the pudding. A game-changer, we noted a while [...]
Click here for more >The Week In Video Part XXVII
Another week and another hefty seven days’ worth of viewing for us at The Raygun. Here’s our round up of our recent viewing… Most of our time viewing at home (while putting our newsletter and musings for this site, naturally) is spent watching horror flicks at the lower budget end of the scale, although every [...]
Click here for more >Mission: The Impossible
Two wildly contrasting titles were the best reviewed in the weekend’s national newspapers, as our weekly round up of press coverage for home entertainment releases shows. One was an effects-laden disaster tale set in foreign climes, the other a black and white kitchen sink drama celebrating its 50th anniversary. And yet as different as The [...]
Click here for more >The BVA Awards 2013 In Full
It’s a tradition now: at the end of the annual BVA awards ceremony, all the assorted winners of gongs at the video industry’s annual celebration of its achievements, line up for a group shot. And here, left, is that picture from the 2013 event, held at the now regular location of Old Billingsgate down by [...]
Click here for more >Everything’s Coming Up Roses
When your first proper full movie release takes something like £44 million at UK cinemas and shifts more than 2 million units in its first couple of months (on its way to 2.5 million sales to date), you’d be forgiven for thinking that a company such as 4DVD would have jumped headfirst into the feature [...]
Click here for more >Where Next For HMV?
One of the key elements of the HMV saga was the amount of column inches, in print and online, devoted to self-professed retail experts offering the retailer advice on what it should do next. And yet among the cacophony of voices shouting at the retailer and administrator Deloitte, few had any working knowledge of the [...]
Click here for more >The Week In Video Part XXVI
The latest update as to our recent viewing at home, with a particular eye on its trade sales potential… Anyone who regularly reads this column, or is familiar with The Raygun, will know that we watch a ridiculous amount of films. As we’ve noted here oft before, it’s part of the reason we write this [...]
Click here for more >A Big Slice Of Pi
With Oscar plaudits still ringing in its ears, The Life Of Pi arrived on DVD, Blu-ray and other formats this week (Monday April 29) and the release dominated the weekend’s newspapers, as our regular round up of home entertainment coverage shows. Ang Lee’s epic tale had a lot to live up to on home entertainment [...]
Click here for more >The Full Story
Anyone trawling through video sharing sites, particularly YouTube, recently, may have noticed an increasingly annoying phenomenon – the growth of the “full movie” available to the billions of online users. Type in those magic words and you’ll be offered any number of films, including recent and current releases, both from cinemas and home entertainment and [...]
Click here for more >Hooligan On Tour
The Rise And Fall Of A White Collar Hooligan was one of the bona fide DTV hits 2012, one that’s used in every other distributors’ sales notes to show just how well the core elements of violence, geezers, the odd football reference, some dolly birds, blags, crime, drugs and booze can still do, as long [...]
Click here for more >Reaching For The Stars
Tom Cruise is still a hugely bankable star, and is still one who has plenty of pull when it comes to national newspapers and magazines, as this weekend’s round up of press coverage for home entertainment releases shows. For Jack Reacher, the actor’s latest outing, was the best-reviewed title of the weekend and was, despite [...]
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