$3.3 million in ticket sales, for a 55-year-old picture rated NC-17. Ken Russell’s The Devils has done well enough in its restored director’s cut that Warner Bros. Clockwork is keeping it in theaters with no end date.
The reissue opened October 16 as a one-week exclusive engagement, took $1.725 million from 350 North American locations across its first weekend for a per-screen average of $4,925, and was held over. On October 29 Clockwork said the run would continue indefinitely, with bookings left to individual theaters. The label is also pointing moviegoers whose local theaters are not playing it to go and ask for it.
The 2004 Reconstruction, Finally in 4K
The version in theaters is not the one that played in 1971. Russell reassembled this cut in 2004 with editor Michael Bradsell, working alongside critic Mark Kermode and filmmaker Paul Joyce. For the 4K restoration, the picture was scanned from the original camera negative at WB Water Tower Color, and WB Sound rebuilt the audio from original composite 35mm magnetic film. The MPA rated the result NC-17, which puts the film back roughly where it started: the 1971 release went out with an X, and the rating was not changed to R until 1979.
This is the only version of The Devils worth arguing about. Russell’s account of the Loudun possessions has circulated for five decades mostly in trimmed form, and the material the ratings board went after is the material the film is actually built on.
Restored horror is having a good autumn in theaters. Scott Spiegel’s 1989 slasher Intruder is going back out with its gore restored, and Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth arrives on digital November 10 in a 20th anniversary 4K restoration.
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