Broom Kid

Empire looks so good.

who cares what George said

I feel like this is a better and better POV to stand on, especially once you can start measuring the distance in time from his selling the whole company and having absolutely nothing to do with it in decades.

I know it might seem weird, but I just… don’t care what he thinks, or feels, about this. I don’t have any desire to really find out how he feels about the restoration happening (but I would also bet there’s no way he’s not on the documentary about the restoration when it finally comes out, too, haha)

So much of the focus here seems to be on getting mad at him, or hoping HE’S mad at this, or some combination of the two and I just… don’t get it! I don’t know this dude, I’ve never hung out with him, I don’t talk to him, will never be at a party with him, he’s never actually done anything to me and I don’t want anything done to him. He’s just a guy, and he hasn’t had anything to do with Star Wars for over a decade now.

I like these three movies quite a bit, and am very interested in what they’re going to look and sound like (so far as I can tell, it’s phenomenal) when they finally get re-released. I’m way more concerned with how I’m going to feel about this restoration than with how he feels about… basically anything.

It seems like it should be like that, absolutely, LOL.

Lucas’ conception of the Jedi being weird emotionally stunted monks (which did not exist until he really started writing Episode I, either) was one of the worst decisions he made in the 90s, honestly. Along with aging Anakin down to 8, and not making Padme the main character of the Prequel trilogy.

he made a ton of absolutely terrible calls in his mythology as he made it up, and because so much of his own self-mythologizing is built around the grandiosity of his own creativity, he basically couldn’t retcon his own bad storytelling instinct to arrive at any of the interesting endpoints his bad setup COULD be saved by.

That Trevorrow wound up looking at the ingredients Lucas laid out for his mythology and arrived at an answer that makes SOME kind of emotional/philosophical sense (vs the dogmatic adherence to what “Balance of the Force has to mean”) kinda speaks to how stunted and forced every aspect of Jedi dogma, both textually AND metatextually.

It’s like Lucas (and Lucasfilm) forgot all this shit is made up, and the only real use any of it has is for allegorical storytelling, and for figuring out a way to use those elements in the pursuit of saying SOMETHING interesting about our own world and lives. Instead everyone at the company is more interested in protecting the canonical integrity of a completely made up religion as if it were a “real” one.

I don’t see any angst

It’s background radiation at this point, LOL. It’s everywhere, at all times. Hell, you can set a watch by the amount of people in any thread about these upcoming releases (not just here, but basically anywhere) who will grab the wheel on a conversation (no matter where it’s at when they reach over the backseat to grab it) and point the car full-speed at any number of 20+ year old gripes specifically about “George” (it’s always George, like we’re on a first-name basis with a deadbeat uncle who flicked lit cigarettes at us when he came over or something), which then touches off a small chain of people getting their grumpy ya-yas out in the exact same rote manner people have been doing it since this site first went up.

And so much of the (false) trivia and (angry) assumptions in the meantime just get calcified into “fact” for no other reason than it makes fandom and fans feel good to keep repeating it in absence of any other course of action. Which brings us back to my observation that so much of this is self-inflicted. Fandoms tend to just do this to themselves if given half a chance.

What I’ve always loved about this one tweet (aside from the fact it’s a tweet) is that it’s also a non-answer, really.

So, aside from the logic hole introduced by the “there’s a clause/stipulation/etc” (if a clause had to be introduced, that means it’s obviously a lie that the originals “couldn’t exist” otherwise you wouldn’t NEED THE “clause” yeah) when the “Lore Guy” at Lucasfilm is talking shit on Twitter, his saying “There’s a notable person who doesn’t want them released” doesn’t actually answer the question “What’s keeping the theatrical versions off home video” because that’s not ACTUALLY saying why they’re not out yet, it’s just telling you something you ALREADY THOUGHT YOU KNEW. Without actually even saying who the “notable person” is. Or why that unnamed person doesn’t want it released (yet).

So a sort of vague non-answer from a guy not THAT high up in the company on a social media outlet from 2017 has been carrying SO MUCH WEIGHT in the meantime. I believe that tweet came right after the announced purchase of Fox (which didn’t complete until 2019).

So much of fandom angst and misinformation is self-inflicted, it really is, LOL.

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.