Legendary director Wong Kar-wai confirmed at the Hawaii International Film Festival that new 4K restorations of all (!) of his films are underway, with all of them scheduled to be completed sometime in 2020.
We’ve been working on these restorations for a long time... Next year is the 20th anniversary of In the Mood For Love, and around the world there will be retrospectives and reissues of the film, along with the other films. A few years ago I watched my film somewhere, looked at the monitor, and said, ‘Why does it look so messy?’ They said, ‘Now we are used to 4K projections, so you have to upgrade it, otherwise you will have those kind of feelings.’ We have been working on it. Last year in Lyon, we showed the restored films in front of 5000[-person] audiences, and it looked very, very good. The problem is that it’s like opening a Pandora’s box, because you will never never feel like it is good enough. You say, ‘It looked better before,’ or ‘The color is not right,’ etc. It brings up a lot of pains.Not much else is known right now about how these restorations will hit the home video market. Criterion holds the U.S. rights to In the Mood for Love (which already has a blu-ray release) and the rights for Chungking Express are still up in the air, but it's possible that they might do another re-release for one or possibly both of these films. Or is there something greater in the works? A full box set of his films for the Collection similar to Ingmar Bergman's? It's possible, but again it's all just speculation at this point. Whatever happens, we'll hopefully at least be getting some more Wong Kar-wai films on home video, Criterion or not.