Punisher: War Zone Director Responds to 4K Reissue Nobody Told Her About

By Russ Burlingame

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Lexi Alexander's Punisher: War Zone got a bad reputation when it was first released, but in the years since, fans have embraced it, making it a cult classic and praising Alexander's bone-crunching action direction. Made for a reported $35 million, the movie earned just $10 million at the domestic box office, but it also came out back when the DVD market was helping smaller movies like that earn their money back via home media sales, and rentals from big chains like Blockbuster and Hollywood Video, which shared a percentage of their earnings with the studios. The result is that the movie has almost certainly made its money back and then some over the years, although home media numbers are a lot less transparent than theatrical grosses.

It's in that context that Best Buy just announced they're making a 4K Ultra Blu-ray, releasing in October with special steelbook packaging. Of course, Alexander was not asked to help oversee the 4K transfer or, apparently, even informed that it was happening.

The filmmaker took to Twitter yesterday after being asked about the new release, and expressed frustration in a series of since-deleted tweets. She noted the hypocrisy of a seemingly never-ending string of reissues and re-releases coming from a movie that the studio consistently characterized as a failure, and how profoundly strange and unfair it is for her to have been stuck in "director jail" for a decade after the film's release, all while Lionsgate was making money off it.

It isn't clear whether Alexander deleted her tweets specifically, because most of her tweets auto-delete pretty quickly. Yesterday was also her birthday, and she tweeted elsewhere about turning off the auto-delete function so that she could keep some of the kind messages she had received.

You can preorder the steelbook version of Punisher: War Zone here.

Here's the film's official synopsis from Lionsgate:

Ex-Special Forces officer Frank Castle (Ray Stevenson, "Rome") is back with all guns blazing as The Punisher, this time waging a one-man war on two fronts. While targeting the vicious mob boss, Billy Russoti, Castle horribly disfigures the gangster in a firefight that also claims the life of an undercover FBI agent. Seeking terrible vengeance, Russoti takes the name "Jigsaw" and begins recruiting the underworld's most notorious criminals while the Feds form an anti-vigilante Strike Force. Now The Punisher must find a way to elude the law and decimate Jigsaw's deadly crime army in this adrenaline-packed action-thriller.

Punisher: War Zone is coming to 4K Blu-ray on October 18th.

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