Okay, so the print has been rented and I’ve got a short 5K test scanned section back.
it’s a mixed bag. I was hoping this would be an untouched print of the film, but it’s not. I’m not sure if people know, but the 2010 Anchor Bay Blu-Ray release, and any digital projection you will see anywhere in the world, is a tweaked version. There are a fair list of tweaks version including removal of gate-hairs, lens flairs, blending matte shots, blending jump cuts, etc… Anyway this 35mm print, is that tweaked version, not the original release.
I was hoping that even if this ‘early 2000s’ print was related to that Blu-Ray release, then it would be the original print which they would have scanned and digitized before adding the tweaks before outputting the final digital tweaked version. I wasn’t even aware that the tweaked version existed as a physical print. You can see in this screenshot, Rob Tapert has been digitally removed from the background. So they must have scanned an original print, tweaked it, and transferred that back to 35mm film for some reason. This is that revised version.
When I did my restoration edit for my 2021 Book Of The Dead fanmade Blu-Ray release, I used that 2010 Anchor Bay Blu-Ray as a base and there was 8m 17s of footage out of the 85m 33s I replaced using upscaled standard definition untampered versions, so that gives an idea of how much footage has been altered;
https://www.bookofthedead.ws/online_portfolio/br_book_of_the_dead_~_book_of_the_dead_2_blu-ray.html
Now I did say the scan was a mixed bag. The colours are really pretty decent (they should be as good as the retail Blu-Ray once tweaked). As you can also see from the above screenshot, the Blu-Ray frame is cropped down from the full 35mm frame. I’ve only checked a few shots which vary according to anything which might need cropping out, but in this 35mm scan there will be more frame visible on every side.
I was hoping for a completely untampered print, and this tampered version is not ideal, but around 90% of the film itself is identical to the theatrical version, and I have my 1080p Blu-Ray restoration ready to go, so all I would need to do is replace the Blu-Ray base I was using, with this 35mm scan, and I can very easily output the untampered theatrical version in 1080p. If in the future, another 35mm print was to be located, then that could fill in the tampered-gaps.