That was before they bought 20th Century Fox though.
This is basically my exact response whenever anyone asks “It’s been almost seven years, wouldn’t Disney have restored the OOT by now?”
I’m guessing AotC just got hit hard with a DNR pass for the blu-ray, on top of the also weird color-timing that tints the image. I remember hearing it argued that the teal push might’ve been done to eliminate the magenta push we see in the old hd master.
Also you can bet if 3D Blu-rays still a thing they’d want to release those. Which I’m guessing are probably sitting on a shelf somewhere since only TPM got released? Not counting sequel trilogy of course.
The entire PT has been “dimensionalized,” but the 3D versions of AotC and RotS have only been shown at conventions.
That just leaves the OT, but it remains to be seen whether Disney will actually want to spend the money to convert that as well. Maybe they’ll get around to it when that magical glasses-free 3D display technology gets invented.
I doubt it’d be all three versions in UHD. I think the fourth disc would be the only UHD one.
Yeah, probably. It’s the most obvious explanation for the difference in disc count, so I’m trying not to get my hopes up. The Blade Runner UHD release certainly didn’t set a good precedent in that regard.
I’d honestly still be overjoyed if we got the ‘97 version thrown in at all, even if it was only on regular 1080p bd. It would sting a little to have that and the OOT stuck in a lower quality than the most recent version, but it still wouldn’t be anywhere near the insult we got with the GOUT.
Depends on what they’re advocating for exactly? I’d want to see the 1997 versions preserved in some way, but the OOT is what needs some love.
This is why I’d be overjoyed if it turned out the “three discs per movie for the blu-ray” from this recent rumor turned out to be the final, ‘97, and unaltered versions, each on their own disc, and the “four discs for the UHD” meant we’d be getting all three versions in UHD, each on their own disc, with the fourth disc simply being the final version on a regular blu-ray (y’know, just so they can call it a “UHD/BD combo pack” with some level of honesty).
I hope the OOT - if Disney does in fact decide to pay for a restoration - actually gets released on UHD and isn’t forever stuck on 1080p sdr blu-ray. Taxi Driver was just announced by Sony earlier today for release on the new format, and that movie was made only a year before Star Wars.
Since an OOT restoration would be done at 4k, I suspect that if it happens at all it will be released on UHD with HDR. This rumor from the “unnamed UK source” about how LFL is looking to make the Skywalker saga four discs per movie for the UHD and three discs per movie for the blu-ray has me very, very curious, because that difference in disc count between the two formats could be for any number of reasons.
We’ll just have to wait and see.
But there is one big thing holding that back, George Lucas. He may not own Lucasfilm anymore, but I’m sure he put in the contract deal with Disney back in 2012 that they are to never release the unaltered trilogy. As much as we would hate to find out that that is the truth, the creator does have their say in this discussion, and Bob Iger would agree to what George tells him.
Yeah, but as has been discussed at great length, if Iger actually agreed to that after spending $4.05 Billion then he should probably have his head examined.
And no, no one is “sure” George put that in the contract. We don’t even know if he would care at all if the original versions were to be restored and included alongside his preferred versions. The only thing we can really say with any certainty is that he definitely doesn’t want his preferred versions of I-VI altered any further by Disney, at least not without consulting him first. But an OOT as “bonus content”? George went down that slippery slope the moment he included exactly that with the 2006 dvd.
I would buy the set of if didn’t include the ST. It’s inclusion actually lower the value I perceive it to have.
Lucasfilm making us buy stuff we don’t want just so we can get stuff we do wouldn’t be anything new. See: the 2011 blu-rays that only included the coveted OT deleted scenes in the more expensive I-VI set and not in the IV-VI set.
I hope the OOT - if Disney does in fact decide to pay for a restoration - actually gets released on UHD and isn’t forever stuck on 1080p sdr blu-ray. Taxi Driver was just announced by Sony earlier today for release on the new format, and that movie was made only a year before Star Wars.
Since an OOT restoration would be done at 4k, I suspect that if it happens at all it will be released on UHD with HDR. This rumor from the “unnamed UK source” about how LFL is looking to make the Skywalker saga four discs per movie for the UHD and three discs per movie for the blu-ray has me very, very curious, because that difference in disc count between the two formats could be for any number of reasons.
We’ll just have to wait and see.
“As seen in 1977.”
If this is a film print they’re showing, does it actually have the original crawl?
Not even the technicolor print that screened in Baltimore almost a decade ago had the original crawl.
How would you people feel if Disney released the OOT in glorious 4K and then Lucas bought back the franchise and made a proper Sequel Trilogy?
Not happening?
And to note the extra bit depth is incredibly useful for color grading work in fanedits.
I’ve run into many issues with regrading the prequels due to the limited amount available on the current blu-rays. Meanwhile working on Solo from the 4K Blu-ray, it’s incredible just how much you can alter the image.
Are you one of the twelve people in the world who actually owns a UHD optical drive?
I have a question about the color bit (depth?). Can you explain it to me like I’m a five year old? How does that differ from the resolution of the image? Is it that there are more colors to choose from, or something about how they are displayed?
In binary you only have two “numbers” to work with, 0 and 1.
8-bit is 2 to the 8th power, or 256, for each primary color. 256 cubed (since there are three primary colors: red, green, and blue) gets you a little over 16 million possible colors with 8-bit.
Extrapolate that out to 10-bit and you get billions of colors, 12-bit billions more.
If I’ve got this right, regular blu-ray still uses 8-bit color but UHD blu-ray uses 10-bit.
RotS was probably finished in 10-bit, although the actual cameras recorded in 12-bit color.
I’m not sure about TPM, AotC, or the four most recent movies, but Reliance MediaWorks’ 4k restoration of the OT was done in 16-bit. Alfonso Cuaron’s recent film Roma was also finished this way.
If that recent report from an “unnamed UK source” has any truth to it, AotC and RotS were actually the most challenging of the first six movies to remaster for the UHD format.
AFAIK, AotC and RotS, though shot in 1920 by 817, would’ve been finished at cinema 2k res for scope (2048 by 858) and had their vfx shots rendered out at that res as well. For the entirely cgi shots, this would’ve been relatively straightforward. Shots involving live action footage were presumably upscaled very slightly, but I could be wrong about that. It’s possible that ILM worked on all the live-action shots at their native res and they weren’t upscaled to “true 2k” until the final DI pass.
The other thing to keep in mind is that the blu-rays are not the best these movies can look. Lucasfilm would presumably have the 2k, 10/12-bit, 4:4:4, DCI-P3 digital cinema source master files on a hard drive somewhere in the vault whereas the blu-rays are 1920, 8-bit, 4:2:0, rec 709 hd video. These movies can look a lot better than their current home video iterations. Even if we take the limitations of 1080p bd into account, I’d still really love to know how AotC turned out looking so tinted and blurry.
There’s actually already been at least one movie shot in 1920:1080 released on UHD, Resident Evil: Afterlife. The pixel count of the cameras used on AoTC/RotS isn’t the problem, it’s more the other specs like color sub-sampling and whatnot. But like I said, these movies were still finished at 2k.
TPM, though shot on film, had vfx added to almost every last shot. This would’ve been done at 2k. So, the “original negative” for all intents and purposes are the finished rendered frames that were filmed out to actual 35mm negative 20 years (and at least a couple weeks) ago today. The digital filmout tapes were still readable in 2011 and were used to rebuild the movie.
It’s worth noting that 2k vfx were the norm up until only very recently. Even a movie like After Earth, which was shot and finished in 4k, only had its vfx rendered at 2k. The effects shots for Blade Runner 2049 (which Harmy worked on) were finished at 3.4k for the live action shots (to match the native res of the cameras) and 4k for the fully cg shots. TLJ had its vfx rendered out at 2048 by 1718 so that when it was “unsqueezed” by 2x (just like the cinemascope camera footage) it would be full 4096.
Just how far, if at all, has the nu-canon delved into the pre-TPM era?
Do we even have a vague idea of what it looked like from TCW/Rebels and the new books/comics/games or would the filmmakers have pretty much a blank slate to tell whatever story they want?
So are the films coming out from 2022 onwards with the Game of Thrones writers? People seem to be upset about them, but I don’t have any knowledge of the series at all. The release dates and the actual movies on the current schedule is so vague.
Edit: Right so it is theirs. Six movies with no information… I don’t know how many of them will actually become reality.
Well, not exactly.
Rian had originally been announced, less then a month before TLJ’s release, as writing a trilogy, and the GoT guys were announced only a month or two later as writing and producing “a series of Star Wars films.”
Then Kathleen Kennedy apparently said at Celebration last month (and I heard this second-hand so apologies if I have this wrong) that Rian and the GoT guys have been talking to each other.
Then we got the announcement just last week of the release dates for three untitled Star Wars films and got confirmation only within the last day or so that the GoT guys are working on the first of these three films.
Everything else seems up in the air at the moment.
Disney released their entire slate for the next few years. They’re going to alternate releases of each Avatar and Star Wars every December (2021 Avatar 2, 2022 new Star Wars, 2023 Avatar 3, etc.).
Makes way more sense now, thank you for the clarification. I went back and clicked the link in that article and see they pushed back Avatar 2 yet again. Anyone remember when it was going to hit theaters December of 2015 (the release window Episode VII moved right into) and was then slated for 2016 until Rogue One stared it in the face and it moved again?
I wonder if WB releasing Dune only a month earlier had anything to do with Disney pushing Avatar 2 back an entire year. Hopefully audiences give it a shot, I’d love to see the rest of Frank Herbert’s main series adapted for the big screen by Denis Villeneuve. I mean, we got five Michael Bay Transformers movies, didn’t we?
Meanwhile, I see Disney’s got a Marvel movie, a Pixar movie, a live-action Cruella movie and (via Fox) Spielberg’s West Side Story remake, all in those last two months of 2020.
Speaking of Spielberg, Indy 5 is still slated for July of 2021, and now that we know there won’t be another big screen Lucasfilm production released until a year and a half later I’s say the chances are good they actually hold to that release date this time.
The Avatar Sequels always make me chuckle. The first one was a huge success, but since 2008 a ton’s changed. We witnessed the rise of the MCU, and with it the “cinematic universe” which we now see with DC and Godzilla. Star Wars and Marvel have become insanely profitable. Avatar 2 should have come out in 2012 or something, back when it was still popular with the public. Once you have two great movies you got a franchise… but as it stands most people will look at Avatar 2 as just another “two-decade late sequel” like Independence Day or Blade Runner. One of which was good the other not- both of which struggled at the box office.
Concerning Lucasfilm- I am annoyed they are stuck to Star Wars. I know this is an unpopular opinion for a star wars site… but George Lucas created his two big franchises from nothing. Why does his company have to stick to just Star Wars? Why not make a new franchise and market it as the “third Lucasfilm property” alongside SW and Indy?
Or just make some Indy movies. How they recast Solo before they made another Indy is beyond me.
It’s funny you bring up the “cinematic universe” comparison, because those are the exact buzz words Fox used two or three years ago when it was officially announced that there would be four Avatar sequels.
It just occurred to me that the same amount of time will have passed since the original Avatar as Cameron took to make said original after Titanic was released.
Disney released their entire slate for the next few years. They’re going to alternate releases of each Avatar and Star Wars every December (2021 Avatar 2, 2022 new Star Wars, 2023 Avatar 3, etc.).
I wonder if WB releasing Dune only a month earlier had anything to do with Disney pushing Avatar 2 back an entire year.
Really doubt that Disney would be worried that the sequel to (as of writing) the biggest movie ever will face rough competition against a remake of a box office flop directed by the guy who just made a long awaited sequel that turned out a box office flop (I’m really excited for it though). More likely than not James Cameron himself is delaying it (or, the same reason it’s been delayed for the last five years).
Oh, Cameron can only be happy they’ve been delayed again. It gives him that much more time to perfect their presentation. More Dolby Cinemas and Imax-with-laser theaters will have opened by that point. He’s been hyping the capabilities of Dolby Vision 3D, and I wonder if this might be the first cgi-heavy 3D production to be finished in natively rendered 4k-per-eye. Maybe by the time the last two sequels come out he will have finally brought his dream of glasses-free 3D projection tech to fruition, even if it’s only in a few theaters here and there.
It makes me wonder how these future Star Wars movies will be made, now that they won’t be constrained by having to fit within the pre-existing saga.
Disney released their entire slate for the next few years. They’re going to alternate releases of each Avatar and Star Wars every December (2021 Avatar 2, 2022 new Star Wars, 2023 Avatar 3, etc.).
Makes way more sense now, thank you for the clarification. I went back and clicked the link in that article and see they pushed back Avatar 2 yet again. Anyone remember when it was going to hit theaters December of 2015 (the release window Episode VII moved right into) and was then slated for 2016 until Rogue One stared it in the face and it moved again?
I wonder if WB releasing Dune only a month earlier had anything to do with Disney pushing Avatar 2 back an entire year. Hopefully audiences give it a shot, I’d love to see the rest of Frank Herbert’s main series adapted for the big screen by Denis Villeneuve. I mean, we got five Michael Bay Transformers movies, didn’t we?
Meanwhile, I see Disney’s got a Marvel movie, a Pixar movie, a live-action Cruella movie and (via Fox) Spielberg’s West Side Story remake, all in those last two months of 2020.
Speaking of Spielberg, Indy 5 is still slated for July of 2021, and now that we know there won’t be another big screen Lucasfilm production released until a year and a half later I’d say the chances are good they actually hold to that release date this time.
Disney has announced the release dates for three untitled Star Wars films, which will be December of 2022, 2024, and 2026, much like the ST.
https://birthmoviesdeath.com/2019/05/07/disney-just-announced-three-new-star-wars-movies
Nothing else has been said about just what these films will be, whether they’re Rian’s, Weiss & Benioff’s, some of each, or something else entirely.
What I find curious is that IIRC Fox had set the release date for Avatar 4 in December of 2024, so I guess that’s getting moved. James Cameron said Avatar 4 and 5 wouldn’t get finished at all unless 2 and 3 do well, so maybe Disney is taking a “we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it” approach now.
Star Wars, meanwhile, continues to be a license to print money.
First Steven Spielberg doesn’t even bother including the later version of E.T. in the blu-ray release or the 4k, now Francis Ford Coppola (George’s friend going even further back) is including both the theatrical Apocalypse Now and Apocalypse Now Redux alongside a new third cut of the movie, all in 4k!
though the rumor says 4 discs per movie for the 4K sets and 3 discs for the BD
Right, I seem to have unintentionally caused some confusion when I said “three discs.”
The assumption is that the three-disc blu-ray and the four-disc 4k will have the same three regular blu-rays and the 4k will simply also include the final version on an actual UHD disc.
I doubt they’ll bother including a dvd copy.
Because if they include things to make it one whole “Saga” with explicit links to the PT and the SW Story films it’s unlikely they want any weird stray threads lying around. It’s always been a Special Edition. It’s always been one interconnected series. George Lucas was a genius and this was all part of his original vision. Solo and Rogue One were smooth productions. It’s all one nice brand friendly package and all remnants of the old versions will be swept away.
But, again, what exactly is “three discs per film” supposed to mean other than that one of those discs is gonna be the unaltered version?
I mean, if Lucasfilm just considers it “bonus content” anyway…
It blows my mind a little but I think you’re totally right, Dre. If anything, we would be more likely to get an official release of the OOT because of a few old school fans/professionals over at Lucasfilm who want to see it released, rather than Lucasfilm wanting to appease a fanbase hungry for the OOT, which doesn’t seem to be the case. I only say that because there sounds like some kind of effort internally to maintain/preserve the theatrical versions of the OT, based off a few nuggets of information, like Gareth Edwards mentioning watching it before/during Rogue One’s development, and them using material from Star Wars for the inclusions of Red/Gold Leader in his film. But I’m no expert on the matter.
Rian Johnson jokingly referred to the SE as “the cartoon versions” the week the 2011 bd was released. You may or may not be able to find that tweet now.
Abrams claims to have shown his kids the original versions when they were growing up.
Edwards didn’t watch the OOT, it was merely the newer 4k restoration of ANH done by Reliance MediaWorks. It was still presumably the SE.
If for no other reason than that it will inflate the price and all of the people who don’t care about the unaltered versions will still pay any amount for a brand new release of Star Wars day one, Disney will include the unaltered versions.
To DrDre’s point about how there’s a growing majority of SE/PT fans within the fandom, I would think many of those fans would still love to be able to see the unaltered OT in modern quality, to see the theatrical TPM and the IMAX cut of AotC. Even if they don’t actively want those things the way we do, I’m sure they would find it a nice bonus to have a historical archive of these films.