Blu-ray, DVD Release: Things to Come (1936)

Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: June 18, 2013
Price: DVD $29.95, Blu-ray $39.95
Studio: Criterion

The future is now in Things to Come.

A classic collaboration between writer H. G. Wells (Island of Lost Souls), producer Alexander Korda (The Thief of Bagdad), and designer and director William Cameron Menzies (Gone with the Wind), the 1936 film Things to Come is a prescient, political science fiction work that predicts a century of turmoil and progress.

A “future history’ that unspools between the years 1940 and 2036, Things to Come is set in the fictional British city of ‘Everytown’. It follows a man named John Cabal (Raymond Massey, 49th Parallel) in various incarnations over one hundred years as he “skips” through time and witnesses to world war, dictatorship, disease, the rise of television, and finally, utopia.

Conceived, written, and overseen by Wells himself as an adaptation of his own work, this mega-budgeted production, the most ambitious ever from Korda’s London Films, is a triumph of imagination and technical audacity.

The DVD and Blu-ray contains the following features:

• New high-definition digital film restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
• Audio commentary featuring film historian and writer David Kalat
• Interview with writer and cultural historian Christopher Frayling on the film’s design
• Film historian Bruce Eder on Arthur Bliss’s musical score
• Audio recording from 1936 of a reading from H. G. Wells’s writing about the “wandering sickness,” the plague in Things to Come
• A booklet featuring an essay by critic Geoffrey O’Brien

Buy or Rent Things to Comes (1936)
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