Recently, Criterion Collection Newsletter subscribers received this message in their email inboxes:

We've got some exciting news for this fall: our first Blu-ray discs are coming! We've picked a little over a dozen titles from the collection for Blu-ray treatment, and we'll begin rolling them out in October. These new editions will feature glorious high-definition picture and sound, all the supplemental content of the DVD releases, and they will be priced to match our standard-def editions.

Here's what's in the pipeline:

The Third Man

Bottle Rocket

Chungking Express

The Man Who Fell to Earth

The Last Emperor

El Norte

The 400 Blows

Gimme Shelter

The Complete Monterey Pop

Contempt

Walkabout

For All Mankind

The Wages of Fear

Alongside our DVD and Blu-ray box sets of The Last Emperor, we'll also be putting out the theatrical version as a stand-alone release in both formats, priced at $39.95. Our Blu-ray release of Walkabout will be an all-new edition, featuring new supplements as well as a new transfer; we will also release an updated anamorphic DVD of Nicolas Roeg's outback masterpiece at the same time.

That's big news for Criterion followers and film fans in general. Criterion already deserves its street cred for setting the gold standard in definitive, authoritative DVDs of classic and contemporary films, usually with restored imagery that knocks your movie-lovin' socks off. Now that they'll be adding the Criterion hallmarks to Blu-ray high-def visuals and uncompressed audio -- oh, man! A whole lotta Blu-ray players are going to be purchased thanks to this announcement.

Yes, I will be double-dipping on some of these, starting with the two that are on my list of Desert Island Discs -- The Third Man and The Complete Monterey Pop (the links go to my reviews of the current Criterion editions at DVD Journal).

Signing up for Criterion's newsletter at their website will entitle you, as a subscriber, to the following special deal: $10 off any order of $60 or more placed at criterion.com through Monday, May 26.

Naturally there's plenty of chatter about this at blogs such as blu-ray.com, Home Theater Forum, and Criterionforum.org. Feel welcome to let us hear from you too in this page's comments box.

New Film.com writer Glenn Erickson (a.k.a. DVD Savant) mentions on his site that "I've also heard that Blu-ray production is stepping up at all the studios, with many titles now in the pipeline at Fox. So I would think that the flood would be beginning around August."

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