Broom Kid

As evidenced by (waves hands at the site in general) special edition cuts of the prequels could very easily be done.

The problem is one of POV - who do you ask to be the creative chief behind that endeavor? The Special Editions back in 1997 were overseen by the writer/director/producer of the first, and the writer/producer of the next two. So it made some sort of sense (the gradations of sense in the applications have been well debated, of course, in the intervening 20+ years, LOL).

I don’t think there’s anyone currently at Lucasfilm who could fit in that role, is there? You’d need to coalesce the vision around someone who basically has PERMISSION to alter the movies (furtherrrr) from a creative standpoint and I dont’ think there’s anyone there who can make that claim. So it’d come off as “illegitimate” from jump - even if whoever it was had a bunch of good ideas.

So far the only drastically different “Special Edition” we haven’t seen since its initial release is the IMAX cut of Episode II, which was primarily done by Ben Burtt, and was done mostly to fit the physical film on the platter! That it improved the film was almost secondary to just fitting it, haha 😃 - but it did improve the film.

I guess maybe bringing Burtt back and having him take a whack at the other 2 could MAYBE work, but it probably brings up a bunch of touchy, uncomfortable conversations about who is in “control” of the saga’s vision now and I can’t see Lucasfilm ever wanting to go anywhere NEAR that.

But yeah, without that huge looming problem, making special editions of the PT should be more than easy, there’s plenty of material they’ve got that could go in, stuff that could come out - reverting Phantom Menace’s original edits to the last reel, reshaping Revenge of the Sith to give Padme basically ANY agency at all w/ the rebellion arc, etc.

CHEWBAKAspelledwrong said:

Sony now distributes Disney physical media via SDS, yes. But I don’t think that implies Sony is encoding the video or even authoring the discs.

My recollection was that there was no implication, the report was that they’d be encoding/authoring/pressing/packaging the discs as part of the deal. I could be remembering that wrong tho!

I’ve heard both companies have gotten notably better with their UHD encodes, though.

Actually, wait, isn’t Sony the company in charge of doing the encoding/pressing of the discs now at Disney? I thought they’d taken that aspect over a little bit ago.

That guy with no name said:

Anyway, back to the actuall topic of this thread.

I hope they release the movies in a box set and not separately like the UHDs. Yes, I know they had a “Star Wars Saga” box set, but that had all nine films…

The home video aspect is really interesting to me. We still don’t know WHO this restoration company is, and why they’re using a codename. I kinda/sorta WANT it to be Criterion or Criterion affiliated (Disney has worked with Criterion before. Not frequently, BUT THEY HAVE.) And the restoration crews that work on Criterion stuff are VERY FRIENDLY with the Disney folks who do film restoration as well. That’s all a bunch of conjecture and what-if but I also think it would be really, really cool if Disney decided to license an original theatrical trilogy home video release to Criterion.

I know it’s much, much more likely they do it on their own (and they can do it on their own, clearly) but it would be so cool if this was a boutique release, by probably the most well-known/well-respected boutique label. I think it’s a no-brainer it’ll be on Disney+ no matter what (they’ve been sitting on those Vintage labels there forever, LOL)

Either way, I gotta imagine it’s going to be a trilogy set, not a saga set. Especially if they’re trilogy theatrical releases, which I think they almost gotta be.

No one here knows anything I don’t know

This is sort of the problem I’m trying to get at, your inability to consider that’s not correct, and how that inability makes you unpleasant to deal with.

Good luck to you!

Firstly, I’m not making “wild, unfounded claims” I’m telling you what I think. I’m giving an opinion on what I think the plausible scenario is, which is that I don’t think they “changed their minds” on anything, I think “give em the originals on the 50th Anniversary” was the idea for awhile now, and then put forward the support for my opinion being that they’d been working on this for YEARS before anyone found out, which means they were likely planning/scheduling it YEARS before that. Hell, maybe they even DID tell Abrams back then, and Abrams just gave a mysterious answer for the hell of it on the press tour because he doesn’t want to let it slip that it’s happening for the 50th. I’m not saying I know for certain, I’m prefacing every opinion I’m giving you with “I think” specifically because I understand a lot of people don’t know HOW to clock an opinion being given UNLESS you specifically do that, LOL.

If you don’t want to hear what people are telling you, if you want to wrestle every conversation into a referendum on you and your belief (or lack of it) and the trivia you can’t wait to share like we haven’t already heard it, I mean - you can do that, but I think you already know how tiresome that comes across, right?

Do you want to know what you’re talking about or do you want to be “right” on the internet? Because those are increasingly two completely different things. If you want to react to people answering your questions in good faith like a cross-examining defense attorney you can, sure. Nothing’s stopping you (certainly not a block button, which we unfortunately don’t have here). But it seems like a real weird way to go about learning stuff you don’t know.

Why do you think Abrams talking to the press on a press tour is giving 100% honest answers at all times? Also when was Abrams giving that answer? About A DECADE ago, yeah? If my answer is “they wanted to do other stuff first, and then decided to do this on the 50th” then probably nothing changed their mind, and Abrams was giving a now 10-yr old answer that isn’t relevant anymore (if it ever was since it was press tour b.s). Like, why would they tell Abrams anything anyway, what does he have to do with it?

Your whole thing since you got here is “Just asking questions” and then arguing almost everything you’re eventually told. You can’t simultaneously know better than everyone in here while ALSO asking everyone in here to educate you on all the shit you don’t know, man! Either you actually want to know, or you just want prompts to talk about how much YOU know. One of those is useful, the other not so much.

Yeah, I don’t think anything “changed their mind” - I think they had ideas for what they wanted to do when they first bought the company, and then those ideas ran their course, and then they decided to get ready for the 50th Anniversary. The fact we didn’t even know they were doing this for YEARS before it accidentally leaked out, pretty strongly suggests they think about stuff like this WAY in advance, on schedules it doesn’t occur to us they’re even working on.

Nothing probably changed their minds, they likely always planned for it to drop on the 50th Anniversary. they’ll have been working on it for 5 years before it actually gets released.

It’s not like this is going to earn THAT much, or that they’re down so bad that they NEEDED it to come out earlier.

I can’t imagine they won’t. It’d be #1 w/ a bullet for this purpose, I’d believe. The only other theater I can think of that’d be even close would be the Westside in Portland, (it was the longest first-run engagement the movie had, over a year I believe) but that theater doesn’t even exist anymore.

You mean open-matte? No, these films were all shot with anamorphic lenses, there’s no matte to remove to force the aspect-jumping gimmick and reveal empty space top and bottom.

IMAX’s aspect-jumping gimmick really only works now because digital cinematography and digital post has made using anamorphic lenses (which are kind of a pain) less necessary - almost unnecessary. So everyone’s shooting with spherical lenses and just matting off the parts of the frame they don’t need. IMAX knows this, and makes open-matte moments a big part of their exclusivity/licensing - a lot of the time, the filmmakers aren’t even the ones overseeing when the mattes get taken off or what has to be done in those sequences, it’s just IMAX doing it and then getting filmmaker approval once they’re done.

RM4747 said:

I hope so, but if they were all being released at the same time, wouldn’t the announcement have mentioned Empire and Jedi too?

No, because they didn’t do that on the first announcement, either. They originally said it would be “Star Wars: A New Hope” and said the release date was April. And then months later they said it was the original theatrical version, and the release date is now February.

We’ve got over a year until the 50th anniversary year actually kicks off. They’ve been working on all three movies since 2022. They’re not going to work on all three movies and then artificially withhold the other two by years when the 50th is right there. They’re not gonna announce everything all at once. They will add to the 50th celebration every couple months, more than likely, with new details as to what that entails, the closer we get to it.

I don’t think they’re going to put all 3 in theaters at the same time.

It’s exactly what they did for the 20th Anniversary. And it was (surprisingly!) huge. People forget now but the Special Edition wasn’t expected to do THAT much business. There’s no reason to think they won’t do it for the 50th Anniversary. It maybe won’t do AS much business now (nothing does, audiences have been steadily declining at the theaters SINCE the 90s, really) but I feel like people are going “there’s no way they’ll do that, they’ll milk it” more out of cynicism/skepticism nurtured over years and years, rather than looking at what they’ve been doing with all three movies basically SINCE they became a Trilogy in the 80s.

edit: I remain astounded at how NATURAL the colors look, especially on Star Wars. Every new leak shows just how striking the photography was on that movie.

I feel like it’s exceedingly likely they’re going to run back the 1997 Special Edition (20th Anniversary) release schedule. They’ll have a whole year of stuff. Theatrical releases in the spring, Starfighter in the summer, Merch/Streaming/Home Video in the fall, in time for the holidays.

They’re not going to stretch out Empire and Jedi on three year (or even one year) waits per movie. They already know that with each movie release the receipts for the trilogy decrease. That’s what happened in 1997, too. These movies are 40-50 yrs old. People aren’t going to wait on them to come out in yearly installments again. There is basically no anticipation for “what happens next” that makes such a thing feasible anymore. They’ve been consuming them AS a trilogy for about as long as it’s BEEN a trilogy.

They moved the release date of Star Wars’ re-release up from April to February 19th. That’s very likely because they’re making room for Empire and Jedi to squeeze in before Starfighter opens. And if they’re doing that, they’re 100% going to have a UHD/Blu-ray release and streaming drops on that same schedule.

My only real question is about the soundtracks. I really want to believe Mike Matessino and Neil S. Bulk (he used to visit here!) have been working on the glory-hallelujah blowout 9-film expanded/remastered set of all Williams’ scores.

But it’s December 2025. This isn’t really happening until February 2027. We got time for all those announcements to come out (or the evidence of their existence to leak, LOL)

You should see it!

Giant wormlady is very paperback vibes, but the section of the movie she was in unfortunately was very cuttable.

and thanks so much, Faelin, for giving it a shot! I’m glad you dug it!

oojason said:

Felling pretty good, mate. 🍺🍺
 

It only took 8306 days (March 10, 2003 - December 5, 2025) before the goal of the site was a confirmed achievement.

8306 days man. That’s 22 years, 8 months, and 25 days. Site’s gone through a lot of permutations in that time.

How we feelin, boys & girls?

Well, it took 8,306 days (March 10 2003 - December 5 2025) but this site’s goal has been finally confirmed.

How’s that feeling, folks?

It’ll come to streaming & UHD.

God the timing on this is just mwah - chef’s kiss.

Vladius said:
I don’t have a dog in this fight

It was never a fight

Also please never use the phrase “media literacy” ever again.

huh.

edit: Will never get over just how sunburnt those blu-rays were. Carrie Fisher almost looks like she got shot in the shoulder.

Nobody tell this dude anything til he pays you five bucks

So what I’m reading is, you paid him to find out behind the scenes info.

He doesn’t know anything more than what you could have got here for free months ago. So what you paid for was embellishment and bad conjecture - and about four separate reminders that he’s got “contacts.” I’m not mad you posted it here. I’m not mad, period. I thought it was a good opportunity to point out what he was actually doing. Think of it as an object lesson in media literacy

Nobody is forcing you to keep vouching for and defending that position. You don’t have to keep doing so, and by doing so, force yourself into making contradictory statements with every quote. You’re just choosing to do it.

None of this is hostile. I can see why it’d be frustrating to someone who wants to keep doing something despite it not going the way they’d like, but that frustration is also a choice.

RM4747 said:

I’m honestly not that interested in the behind the scenes work lol,

You pay Bill Hunt a monthly fee to spoon soft-serve-bullshit into your eyes.

That Patreon post just reeks of B.H’s brand of B.S. It’s pretty clear through the way he’s writing that he “found out about this” the same way everyone else did - via the initial leaks that first happened on the YouTube. Someone musta shot him those details on the low (of course they did, rule #1 of having a secret is telling someone you’re not supposed to).

Everything else in that post is… I don’t know that he’s just making stuff up whole-cloth, but he’s definitely embellishing a great deal on what happened and when it happened. I think he’s simply betting that nobody who is paying him money to talk about home video in 2025 is going to either know, or be in a position to know, that he’s fluffing himself, LOL.

But the big tell is that he seems to have no real idea what the timeline on this was, and keeps talking about it like it’s way more recent than it really was. The whole bit about him tying all this together in his mind (a regular Pepe Silvia here) upon hearing about the BFI screening is the giveaway. He seems to legit believe that screening and this restoration (which began YEARS AGO) are inexorably linked, and that the former is key to the latter.

He’s laying out a line of bull for people who value the idea of being an insider so much they’re willing to pay him a monthly fee to feel like they have a friend in the industry (he takes care to spell out how connected he is, don’t he). He doesn’t know any more than anyone that’s been keyed into this leak from the beginning. But there’s worth in convincing people he does, so he’s going to do that.

I’ll give him this, he’s done a really good job at parlaying being “the face” of DVD collecting in its heyday into an ongoing hustle all the way into the UHD era. He’s ridden the decline of physical media as well as any of his peers ever did. But if you gotta dedicate 3-4 paragraphs to reminding people that you know people, it’s doing the opposite of what you want it to do. These aren’t the days where bonus feature teasers got Hall-H panels by themselves, and it hasn’t been that for a decade.

CHEWBAKAspelledwrong said:

I don’t think Lowry “messed them up”. The DVDs and BDs almost certainly looked as George wanted them.

I’d be surprised if LF doesn’t have an actuate color reference in their archives.

IIRC one of the interview documents that came out specifies that they’re using at least two different references. I believe they have an answer print for each film and even a screening print to check against? I’m not 100% on that though