I hope the OOT - if Disney does in fact decide to pay for a restoration - actually gets released on UHD and isn’t forever stuck on 1080p sdr blu-ray. Taxi Driver was just announced by Sony earlier today for release on the new format, and that movie was made only a year before Star Wars.
Since an OOT restoration would be done at 4k, I suspect that if it happens at all it will be released on UHD with HDR. This rumor from the “unnamed UK source” about how LFL is looking to make the Skywalker saga four discs per movie for the UHD and three discs per movie for the blu-ray has me very, very curious, because that difference in disc count between the two formats could be for any number of reasons.
We’ll just have to wait and see.
But there is one big thing holding that back, George Lucas. He may not own Lucasfilm anymore, but I’m sure he put in the contract deal with Disney back in 2012 that they are to never release the unaltered trilogy. As much as we would hate to find out that that is the truth, the creator does have their say in this discussion, and Bob Iger would agree to what George tells him.
Yeah, but as has been discussed at great length, if Iger actually agreed to that after spending $4.05 Billion then he should probably have his head examined.
And no, no one is “sure” George put that in the contract. We don’t even know if he would care at all if the original versions were to be restored and included alongside his preferred versions. The only thing we can really say with any certainty is that he definitely doesn’t want his preferred versions of I-VI altered any further by Disney, at least not without consulting him first. But an OOT as “bonus content”? George went down that slippery slope the moment he included exactly that with the 2006 dvd.