Once feared lost, the original negative of John Woo’s action classic Hard Boiled has been rescued and restored. The 4K disc is due in June.
There’s cool, and then there’s ‘Chow Yun-fat sliding down a banister, shooting bad guys with a toothpick in his mouth’ cool. It’s an early, iconic moment in an action thriller stuffed full of them: 1992’s Hard Boiled cemented director John Woo’s reputation in Hollywood, and remains a high point in Hong Kong cinema.
For years, however, it was thought that Hard Boiled's original print was lost. Although that film – and other films in Woo’s back catalogue – can be purchased on disc online, some knotty rights issues mean a new 4K release was long thought to be impossible.
In the mid-90s, Golden Princess, the production company that made Hard Boiled and numerous other Hong Kong classics, went bust. The rights to its library of films were then purchased by a firm called Fortune Star, but as part of that acquisition deal, it only had the rights to distribute those movies in Asia.
Those rights eventually ended up in the hands of a massive real estate conglomerate, Kowloon Development Company (KDC), and it was feared that a generation of classic films could be in danger of vanishing into an archive somewhere; KDC refused to sell the rights to individual movies, and so purchasing the entire catalogue would have required a company with deep pockets.
Fortunately, Shout! Studios came to the rescue, and made a deal to buy Golden Princess’s entire film archive in January 2025. This means it now owns 156 titles, from Woo’s A Better Tomorrow and its two sequels, Ringo Lam’s City On Fire, and too many others to list.
If you need a refresher on just how thrilling Hard Boiled is, here’s the 4K restoration trailer:
In the months since the deal went through, the original print of Hard Boiled has been tracked down in the Hong Kong Film Archive and undergone a painstaking restoration process. In a report by Variety, the 33 year-old print was showing considerable signs of age, from dust and scratches to tears running right across the celluloid.
“Our team encountered a significant tear that had split the image across the frame,” a film restoration expert Michael Coronado at a company called Duplitech, told the outlet. “To restore this section, our skilled restoration artists used clone-painting techniques by overlaying adjacent frames to repair the damaged footage.”
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“Restoring the film was both a challenge and a labour of love,” added Henry Weintraub, restoration supervisor at Shout!. “Hard Boiled means a lot to so many people, myself included, and I wanted to be sure we did it justice. It was important to preserve the original look and sound design of the era, while also enhancing both to bring out their full potential.”
The restored Hard Boiled is set to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival under its Cannes Classics section today (the 16th May). After that, though, it’ll be getting a 4K Blu-ray release, making it the definitive home version of a true landmark in action cinema.
Hard Boiled will be released on disc in the US on the 25th June as part of its Hong Kong Cinema Classics line. You can find the full list of its planned releases on the Shout! website.
