Fang Zei

Lust-In-Phaze said:

It doesn’t sound to me like it’s an OOT announcement at this point, but it also doesn’t seem like Force For Change would be a huge 40th anniversary announcement either. If memory serves, all the fanfare it got for TFA consisted of a few youtube videos of JJ standing in front of sets and props.

Ultimately this it’s just a bunch of corporate bs. Disney is going to cross promote something they own (Star Wars) on their very own network (ABC).

If the announcement tomorrow and the “surprises” later this week at celebration turn out to be nothing, can we all agree it was rather dickish of them to lead us on like this? They know damn well what we want and it’s the 40th Anniversary. This isn’t some trivial issue. The fans have been yelling about it rather loudly for well over a decade now.

They should at the very least address the issue. Is that so much to ask?

Fang Zei said:

MisterRey said:

Doesn’t sound like an Omaze thing to me at all.

It’s super vague. “40 years in the making” could literally mean anything.

They probably just want people to tune in so they get good ratings.

MisterRey said:

Doesn’t sound like an Omaze thing to me at all.

It’s super vague. “40 years in the making” could literally mean anything.

yotsuya said:

With the division the PT have caused, my take is to accept the stories, but omit the details. Include the visual, but ignore the dialog. Basically the events happened, those places and species exist, but they shouldn’t refer back to them in any great detail. Coruscant, Naboo, Utapau, could be mentioned or revisitied. The Trade Federation could be a contender again in the ST. Some of those species and places were destroyed by the Empire so you probably want to omit those. Definitely don’t include any Gungans unless they are in the background of a crowd. One thing I was very disappointed in was that The Force Awakens featured so few of the OT or PT aliens. It was great to see new owes, but some of the old ones (other than Nien Nunb and Admiral Ackbar) would have been nice. It was nice to see a different group of Mon Calamari and Ponda Baba in Rogue One. Like in The Last Jedi, if Luke tells Rey what happened during the fall of Anakin and the Republic, it should follow the story of the PT. When you summarize the stories they are pretty good. My kids have the Little Golden Book editions and in those the PT are greatly improved by glossing over things. So at that level, they cease to have the objectionable content (except for Jar Jar - he should never be mentioned again).

This is basically how I feel.

My biggest issues with the PT were George’s scripting and directorial choices. The story itself wasn’t the problem, and even in the best of all alternate timelines George probably would’ve written the story outline himself just as he did for the OT. The prequels still work as “the history of the last days of the Old Republic,” and to the ST characters that’s literally what it is, history.

Crazy theory time:

Disney already has full ownership over the other five movies so far as digital downloads are concerned, right?

Well, couldn’t they just get the OOT out there right now as a digital-only release, if they wanted to?

CHEWBAKAspelledwrong said:

Re: celebration, worth noting the BD sagas are still deeply discounted everywhere this week.

I was saying the same thing the other week, for the same reason.

Then someone pointed out to me that they were probably just trying to take advantage of Rogue One’s blu-ray release. “Hey, we could also pre-order I-VI. We don’t have those on blu. Oh and hey, look at that, they just slashed the price!”

But yeah, my first thoughts upon noticing the discount was “because they know they won’t even be able to give those saga sets away for free after they make the OOT announcement at celebration??? That’s got to be the reason, right???”

Now that I think about it, another omaze thing is probably exactly what this is.

I let the “40 years in the making” part distract me. They’re probably only saying that because they thought it would sound cool.

SilverWook said:

If it’s needed, it has to be a timely response while the iron is hot, so to speak.

Here’s my thinking:

If they don’t even so much as broach the subject, such as saying “we’re actively working on it / we won’t release it until 2020,” then we should assume there is a chance they have no plans at all to ever restore the OOT.

That is when we need to make our voices heard loud and clear to let them know “yes, we want this and we will pay top dollar for it.”

Disney could authorize an OOT release on regular blu-ray now and save the 4k for when they (mostly) get the rights back in 2020. The only potential problem from a business standpoint is that a regular blu-ray of the OOT might be “enough” for many fans who never plan on upgrading to 4k.

Whatever this GMA announcement ends up being, I sincerely doubt it’s a theatrical re-release.

doubleofive said:

Good Morning America is supposed to have something tomorrow:

http://www.jedinews.co.uk/misc/articles/big-star-wars-announcement-coming-tomorrow-good-morning-america/

“40 years in the making”

“you’ll want to be part of this force”

Theories? Just the new charity event for a role in TLJ?

It doesn’t sound like a charity contest for a walk-on role, but I also don’t see GMA (on Disney-owned ABC) announcing something Star Wars related that isn’t 100% controlled by Disney. Also, if it were an OOT announcement then why would they have Daisy showing up?

doubleofive said:

MisterRey said:

Is it possible that they’ll announce a new SE with updated VFX that doesn’t feature the more annoying changes and still stays true to canon? I’d kinda want to see that.

I believe that won’t happen. The “SE” became Lucas’ director’s/producer’s cut, any further changes or rollback would been seen as shitting on Lucas.

I dunno, there was that story a couple years ago about an unnamed source at Lucasfilm having seen a new version of the SE where Han shoots first again.

ray_afraid said:

The best way to handle it, IMO, is to have Leia’s role fade away naturally into the background due to all the other things going on. Then, have her show up again at the end of IX.
I really hope they don’t kill Leia. There’s no way to do that tastefully now. And it’s not like she needs to be at the forefront of the story.

Well, now that someone’s brought it up …

Episode VII was always supposed to focus on the new characters. By all accounts, our OT heroes had little more than cameos in Arndt’s draft before Abrams decided to give them a bigger role. He barely even got to Luke after touting TFA as the OT gang’s last hurrah. False advertising if ever there was any.

So yeah, it sucks that they won’t be able to seamlessly bring Leia’s part of the story to a close, but I have to imagine they had a contingency plan in place for a situation like this. At least Carrie still gets to stay in IX.

Man, will I suddenly become nostalgic for the PT era once I hit my 40’s?

Probably won’t happen since I’m in that middle generation born too late (1985) to have seen even RotJ in the theater but still early enough to very clearly remember a time before even the '95 faces/thx vhs.

The only problem with that comparison is that whoever took the photo didn’t properly set the camera to actually capture the difference. Now there actually is clipping going on in the hdr photo in the brightest area of the window that you can actually see more detail in with the sdr photo. I’m sure if you were in the room seeing it with your own eyes the difference in quality would become much more apparent than this photo comparison can convey.

I don’t think they could release anything without Lucasfilm’s permission. That would probably extend even to ANH post-2020.

My thinking is that Disney might come to their senses and realize that profits shared with Fox from an OOT blu-ray is still way more money than the profits they’d share from yet another reissue of the 2011 discs.

George Miller wanted to shoot Fury Road in native stereo until he realized how incredibly complicated and detrimental to the 2D picture quality it was going to be. I remember noticing a bunch of names listed under “3D camera development” in the end credits as I was walking out of the theater.

Alfonso Cuaron made a similar decision with Gravity. He originally planned on using stereo cameras, but then realized there were limitations a 2D camera didn’t have in capturing his vision for the movie. The vast majority of what you’re seeing in Gravity was rendered natively in 3D anyway.

Which brings me to my next point.

Even on movies like Man of Steel or Pacific Rim, where the director had no interest in 3D, the significant amount of cgi in the movie can still be rendered in native 3D and be used as an effective, eye-catching selling point for paying extra to see it that way.

Now, the other end of the equation is that all of these movies falling above a certain budget basically need to be in 3D purely for economic reasons. Even movies like Oblivion that weren’t in 3D at all need to sell the “formatted for digital Imax” angle in order to help guarantee a good ROI.

nickyd47 said:

Hoping that they put the OOT on Blu Ray now and wait til 2020 to out it back out on 4K UHD disc.

It would make perfect business sense. They get to dip now on a regular blu-ray and then, several years from now when enough people have seen the benefits of the new UHD format, they dip again on 4k.

SilverWook said:

It not a gimmick. 3D has been around in one form or another since the 50’s. People once thought talking pictures, color, widescreen, and stereophonic soundtracks were gimmicks too.

The problem is that too few filmmakers seem really interested in fully utilizing it. There are barely any native stereo productions hitting theaters this year. Transformers 5 is the only one I know of, off the top of my head. Even Paul W.S. Anderson and Ridley Scott abandoned native stereo for their latest movies. Alien: Covenant isn’t even getting post-converted.

Lord Haseo said:

darthrush said:

Lord Haseo said:

DominicCobb said:

http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/late-carrie-fisher-final-star-wars-movie-article-1.3030154

Could be problematic considering we don’t know the extent of Leia’s involvement in VIII. If they cut out some of her performance and place it in IX we could end up seeing her for a few minutes not to mention the story problems that could arise if this isn’t done in a sufficient manner. This whole ordeal is making me nervous.

Same. I would have greatly preferred to have her full role fleshed out in 8 and then recast her for 9 and not alter the script at all. Keeping the story consistent is what is the best course of action in my books.

But what actresses could fill that role that look like Carrie? I don’t they exist lol

The best way to deal with this is of course putting out some comic or novel that has her dying in it. I think it would be better than just addressing her death with a couple lines of throw away dialogue.

I get that it’s Star Wars and the setting/story (and the character of General Leia herself) would actually lend itself to this kind of an ending, but it would be considered in poor taste.

They’re going to wrap up the story as best they can, using whatever footage they can. It really wouldn’t surprise me if they end up using digital tools of some sort for certain shots. I feel like that’s an inevitability.

darthrush said:

Lord Haseo said:

DominicCobb said:

http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/late-carrie-fisher-final-star-wars-movie-article-1.3030154

Could be problematic considering we don’t know the extent of Leia’s involvement in VIII. If they cut out some of her performance and place it in IX we could end up seeing her for a few minutes not to mention the story problems that could arise if this isn’t done in a sufficient manner. This whole ordeal is making me nervous.

Same. I would have greatly preferred to have her full role fleshed out in 8 and then recast her for 9 and not alter the script at all. Keeping the story consistent is what is the best course of action in my books.

Recasting was never, ever going to happen. From what I remember hearing, there was a surprisingly large contingent in favor of having Meryl Streep play Leia in IX. But there were probably just as many people - if not way more - who would’ve hated that idea.

If they can make this work, it’s the best possible outcome. Carrie gets to stay in the saga right up to the very end with minimal re-writing/re-editing and we don’t have to see either extreme of her being written out of the movie entirely or brought back via cgi.

TerranGuy93 said:

Fang Zei said:

SwissArmyTin said:

UHD seems like a bit of a gimmic to me, but I can understand the appeal of 4k in general. It’s just still a tad too expensive right now for most people to upgrade to a 4K TV and 4K blu-ray player. Heck, I didn’t jump on the Blu-ray bandwagon until around 2012 when player prices started falling under $100 a piece.

It’s just such a shame streaming is slowly edging out physical releases. Video quality (and audio, in some cases) just isn’t up to par yet with physical media, at least from what I’ve seen on Netflix, Amazon, and YouTube. Internet speeds can absolutely nuke any and all enjoyment from watching a film the second it starts stuttering and buffering, then crushing the resolution down to 360p until it catches back up for 1080p.

My nightmare scenario is Disney deciding to sit on it until the winds are clearly blowing in the direction of downloads/streaming and physical media is declared dead (or at least on its way out) by the industry, and only then releasing a restored OOT you’d need to download/stream and would never be able to physically own a copy of.

I feel like it won’t come to that, though. They haven’t even released the unaltereds on regular blu-ray, and we’re about to hit that magic seven-year mark since the last revision of the SE anyway. If they wanted to, they could dip on a 1080p disc release now (or next year if they want to keep to the seven-year pattern although that’s probably been coincidence more than anything else) and simply wait until 2020 to dip again on 4k. It’s the UHD release that’s going to need added incentive for people to buy, and May 2020 conveniently coincides (more or less) with the conclusion of the sequel trilogy.

If they stick to the current plan, Ep9 hits theaters in May of 2019. They could put it out by itself and (and possibly in 4k as well, with TFA, RO and Han Solo also having been released on 4k in the meantime since they’re 100% owned by Disney). Then, a year later in September of 2020 they release the I-XI box set you have to buy in order to get the unaltereds in all their 4k hdr glory.

We don’t know what Lucasfilm/Disney has planned for 2020 in terms of a new movie, but presumably there will be one. Whether that movie is a May release or they revert to December, I think the I-IX UHD set is a likely possibility, either hitting stores in September the same day as that year’s movie or simply as part of the cross-promotion if they go with December.

Part of the problem I think is the distribution rights with Fox. If I remember correctly, Fox has the rights until 2020 to the first 6, save for ANH which they get in perpetuity. I’m betting once all they can distribute is the original, Disney will cut a deal for a mega pack with all of them.

Yup, it’s just a simple matter of giving them their cut.

In the meantime, they’ve already reissued the 2011 discs twice since the Disney deal. That should be proof enough that Fox and Disney aren’t at odds with each other.

The question is whether they’ll just keep reissuing the same discs for the next three years or if Disney will see the money-making potential of releasing a remastered OOT on regular 1080p blu-ray before then. If they decide it’s worth sharing some of the profits with Fox they’ll go through with it. They’d still be able to dip yet again with a 4k HDR OOT release after May of 2020.

Life (2017)

One of the better movies I’ve seen in a while. Harkens back to the days of Alien and mashes it up beautifully with Gravity.

Yeah, even amongst brand new movies we’re not seeing everything get a 4k release. Several of the best picture nominees from this year’s oscars were regular blu-ray only.

I thought it was pretty dumb that the I-VII saga marathons in theaters the day before TFA’s release had I-VI in 2D and VII in 3D. To me that smacks of the corporation wanting to sell the 3D version as the superior experience purely because the 3D surcharge is going to make them more moola.

But they will probably get around to doing a 3D conversion of the OT if for no other reason than the fact that it’s now bookended by a conversion of the PT and that every new movie made under Disney has been and will be released in 3D. It will surprise me big time if they don’t eventually get around to it. Remember that first trailer for the '97 SE with the x-wing flying out of the tv? It’s really not so hard to imagine them doing something similar with 3D.

The problem is that enthusiasm for the format has waned a bit in the seven years since Avatar. At this point they might as well also do Dolby Vision and Imax-with-laser versions just to fully take advantage of all the projection formats modern technology can offer. If nothing else it would give the theaters more money-making options for those saga marathons the day before each new Skywalker movie comes out.