A few weeks after announcing the shut down of its streaming service FilmStruck, The Criterion Collection will be launching a new independent streaming channel titled simply The Criterion Channel, with its debut set for sometime in spring 2019.
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In their announcement of the new service, the home media production company thanked the fans of the FilmStruck service for their disheartened responses to the closure.
“We are incredibly touched and encouraged by the flood of support we’ve been receiving since the announcement that FilmStruck will be shutting down on November 29, 2018,” the announcement read. “Our thanks go out to everyone who signed petitions, wrote letters and newspaper articles, and raised your voices to let the world know how much our mission and these movies matter to you.”
The disappointment of the closure of FlimStruck expanded past just audiences, with a letter directly appealing to WarnerMedia to keep it open being penned and signed by Paul Thomas Anderson (Phantom Thread), Damien Chazelle (First Man), Alfonso Cuarón (Roma), Guillermo del Toro (The Shape of Water), Leonardo DiCaprio (The Revenant), James Gray (Ad Astra), Alejandro González Iñárritu (Birdman or (The Unexpected Virture of Ignorance), Barry Jenkins (If Beale Street Could Talk), Rian Johnson (Star Wars: The Last Jedi), Christopher Nolan (Dunkirk) and Barbra Streisand (A Star is Born), amongst other.
Similar to the service before it, The Criterion Channel will feature a library of classic entries of cinema from all over the world and different genres from a range of filmmakers, while also featuring programming that will give spotlights to up-and-coming and old directors and actors, retrospectives from these filmmakers, as well as feature commentaries, behind-the-scenes footage and original documentaries. They will also continue the regular series “Adventures in Moviegoing,” “Art-House America,” “Split Screen” and “Meet the Filmmakers,” and the “Ten Minutes or Less” section will live on, along with Tuesday’s “Short + Feature” and the Friday Night Double Feature.
The channel will also be available on the upcoming WarnerMedia streaming service when it debuts late next year, but those subscribed to FilmStruck will not automatically be subscribed to The Criterion Channel, being offered a 30-day free trial before having to pay $10 a month or $100 for the entire year.
