I was going over the wiki entry just now, and now I'm wondering if they won't wait until even later than the premiere of the live-action series to do the 3D re-releases. Apparently McCallum said that they're waiting until the technology is cheap enough to widely implement.

Then again, 2010 is a long ways away. If Cameron plans on having enough 3D theaters to release Avatar in by December of 2009, I would think Lucasfilm would use that as an opportunity to attach a trailer announcing "coming in 2010, the 3D re-releases of the Star Wars movies."

Obviously I wasn't thinking that we'd get the blu-ray until the movies hit theaters again. I only meant that the 3D-re-release-followed-by-a-blu-ray-release-a-few-months-later hopefully isn't more than another two or three years away. That's only really going on the pattern that these movies followed on dvd:

Close Encounters, 2001
Godfather, 2001
Star Wars Trilogy, 2004

Now we have:

Close Encounters, 2007
Godfather, hopefully by the end of this year
Star Wars (with everything we want): hopefully by the time the live-action series hits.

zombie84 said:

Lucas' response to this would be: I DID restore the trilogy, it costs millions of dollars and came out on DVD in 2004. Ugh.

Yea but that's the thing. We're not asking for him to spend millions of dollars. In fact, as it's been pointed out, there's a professional willing to do it for free!!!!

Look at what happened with Blade Runner. The final version is the one that got the 4K mastering and was cleaned up frame by frame to within an inch of its life. By comparison, the remastering they did on the older versions is nothing, BUT AT LEAST THEY REMASTERED THEM.

That's the truly messed up thing about this situation. All it would really cost Lucas at the end of the day is the added price of including an extra disc in the packaging. That's why I'm not TOTALLY putting it out of the realm of possibility that he'll give us the simple thing we're asking for. Because, as I've said, blu-ray isn't the same ballpark as dvd. If we're already getting The Godfather this year, and when we remember that Lucas only really held off on the OT on dvd because he wanted to wait until Episode III had been released (2001 was also the year that a Star Wars movie hit dvd for the first time), I can't imagine the next release being more than a couple years away.