Literally one of the first things Disney said upon acquiring Lucasfilm just over five years ago was that the Star Wars universe has “over 25,000 years of history.”
This would only lend more credence to someone’s theory upthread about Rian’s trilogy being about the origins of the Jedi, which is pretty much exactly what I’ve been wanting them to do.
Not that it really matters (as evidenced most recently by Thor: Ragnarok), but I wonder why Universal will always own the release rights to any future standalone Hulk film.
Did Marvel completely sell them off at some point?
Is it different from the situation with F4 where Fox needs to make another movie every several years?
A reminder that THX is going to be on Turner Classic Movies this Thursday night at 9:15pm PST.
If somebody can DVR it, I’d be most grateful. The fact they ran the post Star Wars reissue trailer to promote it tonight makes me think something might be up!
I’m watching it right now and, as expected, it’s the 2004 version.
Ah yes, I didn’t think about the Disney films. Indeed, OBWAT is not the first DI.
There was also the Gone With the Wind restoration from the early 90s. That was completely digitized.
OBWAT is the first complete DI of a live action movie.
As for the ‘98 theatrical re-release of GWTW, only 12 minutes or so of the movie was digitally restored, according to this article:
Slightly off-topic here, but were the 70mm prints of ESB and RotJ 5.1 or were they still configured for the 4.2 arrangement that Star Wars used in ‘77?
Phantom menace was a cut negative, but since most of the film went through some form of digital manipulation, its mostly 2K filmouts.
According to IMDB, TMP was processed through a 2k DI: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120915/technical?ref_=tt_ql_dt_7
Imdb is user-based. I’ve seen some blatant inaccuracies in the technical specs of certain movies listed there. TPM was indeed a cut neg in ‘99.
In 2011 they were able to reconstruct the movie directly from ILM’s digital filmout tapes, which were still readable after more than a decade. This got them as close to the true original negative as possible. I’m not sure what the procedure was for the remaining shots that never went through the computer at all, whether they were scanned in from the cut neg or whether they were sitting on the filmout tapes as well for some reason.
In any event, this final(?) version of the movie would have been assembled digitally as a 2k DI, but whoever edited the imdb page should’ve specified that this was not done until the 2011 release.
I agree most people don’t realize that film can look “hd”, though it’s not really their fault, they’re just not aware of it (I wasn’t too until some years ago! 😄 ).
About grain, though, I don’t know anyone who actually dislike it. Maybe they use DNR on movies just because it eases digital compressions and makes special effects blend better with the live-action footage.
Ease of compression and vfx blending have little to do with it.
They use DNR because they think that’s how people want their movies to look.
At least they’ve rectified many of the more egregious examples with proper remasters.
The next time you hear someone say film isn’t hd, remind them that The Shield - a show shot in 16mm - is being remastered in 4k.
I have the doc in HD and the crawl is upscaled
Man, even in straight-from-the-cable-box hd on an actual 720p tv with 1:1 pixel mapping, that wasn’t apparent at all. Although maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised by that.
There isn’t anything other than rabbit ears and a basic 2008 blu-ray player hooked up to my 1080p set (also from 2008), but I’m guessing it’s more noticeable at that res?
It would be fun to compare against the GOUT.
I can get - and share - a capture of this Spielberg doc.
Could you tell me at what moment the crawl does appear?
It’s just a little after the 37 minute mark.
I don’t have a dvr and my attempts to screenshot it on the hbo go app with my phone just get me an image of solid black for some reason.
The solid black is a piracy prevention tactic used by most streaming services now to prevent screen recording of purchased or rented materials. Sometimes you can still get audio, but the video is blacked out.
I managed to screenshot it on the comcast app, but this is on my phone, which is only 1334 by 750 pixels. So I’m not sure how much good this would do for a comparison with the GOUT and the SSE. Maybe I should take this to the preservation forum.
Has Lucasfilm made any official announcement that this movie is even happening yet?
To my knowledge, all we have to go off of is the Hollywood Reporter article from earlier this year.
Was the Empire of Dreams scan an upscale? I genuinely don’t remember.
What I meant was that the crawl in the Spielberg doc didn’t look like it had merely been upscaled from the clip in EoD. It looked like it came from a much higher quality source. Sorry if I worded it confusingly.
Do we even know what source was used for EoD? There had never been a home video release that included the unaltered crawl when EoD was put together in ‘04.
Is it the same as the scan from Empire of Dreams?
It doesn’t look upscaled. To my eyes, it looks like a native hd transfer.
What source did the earlier versions of Despecialized use (or the current version for that matter)? I’m thinking specifically of the one that was used for the Kitbashed documentary on vimeo.
What source did EoD use back in ‘04 anyway?
Because I didn’t feel like starting a new thread just to bring this up:
Did anyone see the Spielberg documentary that aired on HBO the other night?
The original ‘77 crawl makes its appearance for a few seconds as Steven tells his version of the now well-known story about De Palma suggesting an opening crawl to Lucas.
I don’t have a dvr and my attempts to screenshot it on the hbo go app with my phone just get me an image of solid black for some reason.
But I bring all of this up because it at least appears to be from a better quality source than the GOUT. Perhaps it was taken from the fresh (presumably hd) scan that was done back in ‘06 before it was downscaled all the way to 4:3 letterbox.
Has the original crawl popped up anywhere else over the last eleven years in comparable quality?
I’ve tried to understand this point for months now, but I really just have to ask: why would the rights reverting to Disney in 2020 make any difference whatsoever? They’ve released the trilogy on home video two or three times since the LFL buyout, albeit in the pre-existing 2011 edition, and they finally put the saga out on digital formats as well in that period. Why wouldn’t they wait until 2020 for those, too, if it was just a matter of making the most money off of them? And even when 2020 rolls around, they’ll never have the rights to the original 1977 Star Wars, so it’s not an issue of them not being allowed to restore the OOT either.
What moviefreakedmind said regarding the 2011 discs.
As for releasing the digital version in 2015 instead of waiting, that was because Fox never owned those particular rights to the other five movies to begin with. George held on to them, which means they immediately became Disney’s when the buyout happened (you can’t buy ANH on Disney’s digital download service, but you can on itunes, amazon, google, etc). Same thing applies to the tv broadcast rights.
Nothing new in it really, but a new Gizmodo article:
http://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2017/09/why-hasnt-disney-released-the-original-unaltered-star-wars-films/
I kind of wish a lot of noise was made about this, especially with Reed’s recent Tweet. I don’t think it’d change Disney’s mind of anything, but it’d nice if the cause got a little more exposure.
We’ve got three years to continue making noise. Lucasfilm isn’t gonna say a word on the subject until then. Reed’s tweet is certainly a nice start, although it’d be even better if someone working for Lucasfilm itself would speak up.
Johnson slammed the SE in 2011, years before he was hired, but Abrams did at least let it slip in a 2015 interview that he’d shown his kids “the original versions” specifically. I’d certainly love to know what Edwards and Ron Howard’s thoughts on the subject are.
When Trevorrow said he would shoot all of IX in 65mm I assumed he meant traditional 5-perf spherical 65mm aka Super Panavision which he used for some of Jurassic World. Abrams has only shot his movies in cinemascope, with some of STID and TFA shot in Imax (Johnson is doing the same for TLJ).
I wonder if JJ will follow Nolan’s lead and shoot all of Ep9 on 65mm stock with some of it in Imax.
To bring the Avatar conversation back around to Star Wars, Cameron essentially took what Lucas was doing with AotC and RotS and went a few steps further.
The sony cameras used were only slightly better versions of the same 2/3” ones used for the latter two prequels. The big difference obviously is that for Avatar they were arranged into beamsplitter rigs to shoot in native stereo.
Instead of shooting everything against greenscreen, more than half the movie was MoCap’d without even using actual cameras.
Most significant of all is the digital character work ILM had started with Jar Jar in TPM and Weta had expanded with Gollum and Kong. The animation for the Na’vi came pretty darn close to bridging the uncanny valley, although it probably helped that they weren’t supposed to represent recognizable human characters like Tarkin in Rogue One.
Circa 2011 I remember thinking for sure that when George inevitably went back on his word and made the ST that it would be a native stereo production, probably using RED cameras.
Then the Disney deal happened and they hired JJ to direct. There went any chance it wouldn’t be shot the exact same way as the OT (and JJ’s other movies).
But by that point the post-conversion tech had actually gotten pretty good and had become more about the extra surcharge anyway, so by the time Episode VII was actually made it didn’t matter one way or the other how it was shot.
Does anyone in the world actually care about the Avatar sequel? The opinions of everyone I know range from “huh?” To “meh.”
Fox essentially sold the sequels as a cinematic universe (something all the big studios are trying to do with their major properties these days) when they announced there were going to be four of them is instead of just three.
Cameron starts shooting them tomorrow, btw.
What SilverWook said.
Also, as I’ve pointed out, 2020 may very well end up being Lucasfilm’s hiatus year from new Star Wars movies. It would only make sense considering Episode IX hits theaters the very end of 2019, and they’ll be busy enough as it is with Indy 5 hitting theaters July of 2020.
They can’t release anything at the end of 2020 without bumping up against Avatar 2 box office-wise. The only time to release the Obi-Wan movie would be May, and that seems awkward to me when the saga will have just ended that December and they already have Guardians vol 3 scheduled for 2020, presumably for that first weekend in May.
Of course, I say that as the Han Solo movie is scheduled for just three weeks after an Avengers movie, but still.
Like I said, I would love to know what possessed Peyton Reed to tweet this out.
It’s probably the closest anyone has come to “rocking the boat” in regards to the OOT whilst still being employed by Disney post-2012.
They have no reason to keep waiting past May of 2020.
I’m not going to hold my breath until then, but the situation with Fox is very obviously the reason it hasn’t happened just yet.
ray_afraid said: If you’re watching despecialized, they’re there. Painstakingly restored.
Damn, everything Harmy does in this damn thing just impresses me more and more.
Peyton Reed, director of Ant Man, tweeted this yesterday.
"Dear Lucasfilm,
Please release a Blu-ray of the original, unmessed-with version of STAR WARS I loved when I was 13.
Thanks,
Peyton"
And retweeted at the OT twitter. Thanks for finding that.
Huh. I didn’t know we were on Twitter. How many followers do we have?
Peyton Reed, director of Ant Man, tweeted this yesterday.
"Dear Lucasfilm,
Please release a Blu-ray of the original, unmessed-with version of STAR WARS I loved when I was 13.
Thanks,
Peyton"
He’s worked for Disney too. Won’t mean anything in the long run, or the short run for that matter, but it was nice of him to articulate what we’ve all been saying for many years.
He still does work for Disney. 😉
I wonder what brought this on. Maybe he wanted to show the OUT to his kids and then realized he couldn’t?
Rian Johnson also tweeted this in January of 2011:
https://twitter.com/rianjohnson/status/23164864209887232
Granted, this was long before he was hired for Episode VIII.
The only replies still showing up for me are from 2015.
Getting Robert A. Harris to supervise an OOT restoration would eliminate most disagreements about how it should look.