Del Toro Double Coming To DVD
Update: As Brendon suspected, this was an April Fools gag. He seemed to be the only suspicious voice out there, and it turns out he was right to be doubtful.
Not only have Criterion announced their edition of Guillermo Del Toro's debut feature Cronos, but Dimension have scheduled a release for the Director's Cut of Mimic too, to take place on July 8th. Cronos is currently out of print in R1 but the theatrical cut of Mimic can be picked up very easily everywhere.
The Cronos news broke on the Criterion e-mail news letter with the publication of their latest "Wacky Animal" cartoon, which you can see at the head of this post. Twitch seemed to be the first to run the press image of the Mimic disc which I've reproduced below the break with a (short) list of all known special features.
Criterion have announced no supplementary material for the Cronos release as yet, though the film's thread on their forum might be the best place to bookmark for the scoop.
Dimension have promised both an audio commentary on Mimic as well as a documentary detailing the making of the film, which should include some illumination on how it ended up needing a revised cut in the first place.
The label "Director's Cut" is a tricky one at times, and as used here I'm not entirely sure it gives the right impression. Many of the things Del Toro would want to put right with Mimic, he can't put right, not any longer – the opportunity was lost during shooting. It isn't a case of a film being malformed solely during post production. But 'Cut' does imply that we are talking about an edit that belongs to the Director, and that will be true in this case.
It's understood that Del Toro has a VHS copy of his preferred cut and that formed the basis of this new edit. How much colour correction, sound recording and mixing or FX work was necessary, or has been permitted, is as yet a mystery. Even the recycling of music cues from elsewhere in the film, as opposed to the recording of new score, has limited the 'perfection' of some extended cuts so I hope Del Toro was given all he needed and no more compromises were forced.
As an outsider looking in, it was pretty easy for me to appreciate Mimic for what it was and how it fit together. I have no idea of how it falls short of Del Toro's ambitions, at least not in any concrete or specific terms but hopefully this new version won't simply expose the flaws in the original but supercede it and replaces something I really like with something I really love.
(As a footnote, let me tell you that, actually, I'm a little sceptical about this Mimic story – especially in light of the date today. Perhaps because I'm a hardbitten cynic, perhaps because "12th Anniversary Edition" doesn't ring true, perhaps because it's unlike Twitch to run something like this from a press release and no trace of that press release show up elsewhere, and also because Twitch don't even list all of the special features, rounding off with "a bunch more". Having said all of this, I have taken it under advisement from other quarters that they think it's real. I hope they're right – and, anyway, we know a Mimic Director's Cut is coming one day, if not now)