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Old 6th September 2023, 11:01 AM
Michael Brooke Michael Brooke is offline
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Join Date: Nov 2011
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Under EU copyright legislation (which we're still in sync with, and I can't see that significantly changing), they'll definitely still be in copyright. Even films from turn of the 20th century pioneers like G.A. Smith are still in copyright (because he died in 1959, less than 70 years ago), and Cecil Hepworth's equally 120-plus-year-old films only fall into the public domain next year.

The challenge with the early Hammer titles is (a) they'll need extensive restoration work along the lines of what we've been doing with Tod Slaughter's probably more commercially appealing back catalogue (so you're still talking a hefty production budget merely to beat them into releasable shape), and (b) right now they may well be tied up in the fallout from the Network collapse, as they had the rights to Hammer's pre-Curse of Frankenstein films, so I've no idea what's happening with them at the moment, or indeed how far Network got with restoring them (although I suspect with the very early Hammer titles, it's "not very").

Trust me, we're keeping a very close eye on the Hammer situation, and will pounce if anything changes to our advantage (for instance, Sony creating HD masters of three more comedies besides The Ugly Duckling), but I'm afraid nothing's going to happen any time soon. Hence us focusing on Hammer-adjacent projects like Jean Rollin, Mexican genre films and (forthcoming but imminent) Ozploitation, the last two on the grounds that tentative toes in the water a couple of years ago (Roadgames, Mad Dog Morgan, La Llorona, The Phantom of the Monastery) turned out to be surprisingly big hits that sold out much faster than expected.
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