During our meeting with Artisan Entertainment’s director of Sales and Marketing Jeff Fink during the DVD ’99 conference, he told us that there may be two separate release of The Blair Witch Project on DVD. Two different reasons made this a viable option at the time.

The directors of the film wanted to create a director’s cut of the movie, now that additional funding is available through its highly successful theatrical run. Apart from that, Artisan Entertainment felt it was important for this release to create a special edition with plenty of material to support the film and to explain much of the background. At the time Fink was concerned the window before the video release would not be sufficient to create such a special edition. As a result the idea was to make a regular DVD available day & date with its VHS release, and then take the time to create a special edition with a director’s cut for a release at a later point.

Today Jeff Fink informed us that with the current plans there will be only one release of “The Blair Witch Project”. Apparently there was enough time to prepare the special edition bonus programming in time for the day & date release on October 26, which would have been the main reason for a separate release. As a result, Artisan Entertainment decided to indefinitely postpone a director’s cut of the film at this time.

I am happy to see that turn-around times for DVD content programming seems to be getting shorter and shorter. A disc that would have taken months to produce a year ago can be made available today in a matter of weeks thanks to vast improvements in authoring hardware and software. If you were eagerly awaiting a director’s cut of the film, well, all I can say at this point is that the theatrical version seems to have been awfully effective, so why change a winning horse?