Factory's Manchester story storms UK cinemas again in 4K

Salford hosts the premiere and a Q&A with Winterbottom, Coogan and Eaton today, before the remaster reaches screens on Friday and lands on disc later this month.

Michael Winterbottom's 24 Hour Party People returns to cinemas across the UK and Ireland on 9 October in a new 4K remaster. The 2002 biopic of Factory Records founder Tony Wilson will also be available digitally and on 4K UHD disc from 26 October, marking the film's twenty-fourth anniversary.

A premiere screening opens the Beyond The Music conference in Salford on 6 October, followed by a Q&A with director Michael Winterbottom, Steve Coogan — who plays Wilson — and producer Andrew Eaton. Coogan has described the film as "the work that is closest to my heart".

From the Sex Pistols gig to Madchester

The film chronicles the rise of Factory Records from the 1976 Sex Pistols gig through Joy Division, New Order and Happy Mondays to the Madchester era. Joy Division, the English band from Manchester, sit at the centre of the label's early years. Their singer Ian Curtis died in 1980; the group did not continue under that name, and the remaining members formed New Order. The Manchester band that came out of Joy Division carried Factory forward into a new decade and a new sound, and remains one of the acts through which the whole story is still heard.

Happy Mondays, the English band from Salford fronted by Shaun Ryder, arrive later in the same arc. They are among the groups through which the film reaches the Madchester years — the point at which Factory's reputation, already built on Joy Division and New Order, met a wider and messier public. New Order and Happy Mondays are among the bands central to the narrative Winterbottom put on screen.

For listeners who know those records as daily companions rather than period pieces, the film's subject is not nostalgia for its own sake. It is the work: the stage, the voices, the run of singles and albums that turned a Manchester label into a myth, and the gap between the myth and the nights that actually produced it. Coogan's Wilson narrates with showmanship and self-mythologising, an unreliable guide to his own legend and to the scene he helped shape.

Cannes, then a second life in 4K

24 Hour Party People originally premiered at Cannes in 2002. The picture mixes documentary texture with comic invention and treats the music and the legacy of those years as the point. That emphasis is why a fresh cinema run still matters. The bands at the core of the story have never left the air. Joy Division's catalogue remains a fixed part of the post-punk map; New Order's path still stands as the model of a Manchester group moving from one era into another without losing the thread; Happy Mondays hold the sound of a particular Salford swagger that Factory both fuelled and struggled to hold.

The 4K remaster brings that frame back to the big screen for audiences who first met the film on home video and for those who have only ever known Factory through the records. Cinema dates begin on 9 October across the UK and Ireland. Digital and 4K UHD disc editions follow on 26 October.

The Salford premiere places the reissue in the city the film is about, with the director, the lead and the producer on hand before the wider release. Twenty-four years after Cannes, the Factory story has not gone quiet. The remaster gives Winterbottom's version of it another chance in the dark, where the noise, the jokes and the records were always meant to land together.