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Wes Anderson is a singular director, with an instantly recognizable (and oft-parodied) visual style, and now he’s getting the auteur treatment from Criterion. The Wes Anderson Archive: Ten Films / Twenty-Five Years was announced last week, coinciding with the release of The Phoenician Scheme. The box set will drop on Sept. 30, and is available to preorder from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Walmart, and Criterion’s website.
The Wes Anderson Archive: Ten Films, Twenty-Five Years (The Criterion Collection) [4K UHD]
The Wes Anderson Archive retails for a whopping $500; its steep price tag is in part due to the 4K UHD quality, with the remaster supervised by Anderson. The films are presented in Dolby Vision HDR, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtracks. The 20-disc set comprises 10 discs of the movies and 10 discs featuring bonus content. The box set is presented in a stylishly minimalist cloth-bound box, while the disc cases are designed to resemble books.
The set includes Anderson’s 10 films, from 1996’s Bottle Rocket to 2021’s The French Dispatch. That means that Asteroid City, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, and The Phoenician Scheme are not included in the box set. Of course, given Anderson’s penchant for symmetry, a 10-film, 25-year collection certainly has a ring to it.
As for the bonus features, they include audio commentaries, interviews, documentaries, deleted scenes, auditions, visual essays, and more.
Announcing the release, Criterion said, “Wes Anderson’s first ten features represent twenty-five years of irrepressible creativity, an ongoing ode to outsiders and quixotic dreamers, and a world unto themselves, graced with a mischievous wit and a current of existential melancholy that flows through every captivating frame.”
As for Anderson’s latest, Rolling Stone film critic David Fear wrote, “You leave impressed that Anderson can still manage to do what he does best without succumbing to self-parody here. The blueprint may be familiar. But it’s still a pretty foolproof plan.”
