I would stop worrying about weather this print is the holy grail of all prints and just adjust for the muck all over it.

I think you should use the WOWWOW and simply get rid of the Hue’s in the pixels after the sampling.

You can not reverse the blown out Blu Ray but you can simply de-saturate any weird leftovers.

It’s still like night and day. I think you need to stop thinking “exactly” because the 35mm print is probably far from exact also.

So you what you will have is very much “in the spirit of the original theatrical presentation” and would still be a huge improvement over what is currently available. Don’t beat yourself up!

Ok so I cleared some of the hues out the WOWWOW regrade for this shot. Does it look massively different? Not really…it looks pretty much the same but I reduced all the magenta and yes there is a problem with Blue again. Looks better now. Looks pretty similar to the 35mm but without all the dark crap in it.

It’s not like bad to be slightly different. But to be massively different yeah that is and that is why you are doing it right? So don’t worry too much about being 100% accurate to a old print that is not exact anyway.