Fang Zei

SilverWook said:

Don’t most UHD titles come with a Blu Ray disc already?

Well that’s the thing …

If we’re talking a multi-disc release with the SE and unaltered on separate discs, do they include two more regular blu-rays? Even if they did, the price would be significantly higher. I could almost see them forgoing the “combo” approach and making you choose.

… Or, they keep it to just the most recent version remastered in 4k, leaving the OOT and the '97 version completely off the table, and debut it on both formats (regular and 4k blu) to go along with TFA and RO. Then they could include a regular blu (which would still look better than the 2011 discs) in the package as well. They could even put out the PT on the new format the same day. Being stuck in 2k hasn’t stopped all these other movies from reaching UHD.

Honestly, we’re getting ahead of ourselves until we know anything is happening at all this year.

I’d like to think they would finally do justice to the unaltereds this year. I just can’t see anyone caring about yet another release of the SE, even if there are more changes to sift through, even if it’s from a new 4k master you can watch at full res with hdr.

But a remastered OOT? People will put their money where their mouth has been all these years and buy it day one. A multi-disc package that doesn’t include regular 1080p versions might even sell a guy like me a UHD player just so I don’t have to double-dip later on.

Even if they only release it on regular blu, the people who’ve upgraded all their hardware to 4k will begrudgingly purchase it. Like I said, this would still piss those people off and Disney would be smart to let Fox put it out in 4k.

Who knows what the hell will happen. We’ll see.

Couldn’t have said it better, CHEWBAKAspelledwrong.

Disney “could be gracious enough to” let Fox release the hypothetical OOT on UHD day-and-date with the 1080p blu.

Keeping the UHD in their back pocket for after 2020 would actively piss off a lot of people now that I think about it.

SilverWook said:

The crashed X Wing looks a tad out of scale. 😉

And damn, someone at Celebration better be telling us we’re getting all that alternate footage down the road.

Kinda awkward doing it only a couple weeks after the initial blu-ray goes on sale, though.

joefavs said:

Has anyone suggested that Disney might put out a regular Blu-ray (of either the OUT or a new master of the SE) this year and then a UHD release after 2020? They’d be able to cash in on the anniversary and have something exclusive for when Fox’s distribution deal runs out. Plus the ST will be complete by then, so it could be box set city.

That’s been a big theory of mine as well.

The timing is certainly right. They could get away with it being a 1080p-only release this year, for the 40th. Next year, not so much. But I would still hope the unaltered trilogy eventually makes it to the 4k disc format as well.

DominicCobb said:

Interesting. This wouldn’t be surprising if Johnson hadn’t already said he wouldn’t shoot anything in the format. Wonder what changed.

Funny, I never heard about him saying that. Was it before principle photography started in earnest? It may very well have been a last minute decision.

I won’t link to the slashfilm article I got the news from as even the photo of the camera has what some could consider to be a spoiler, but Imax’s twitter confirmed today that some of Episode VIII was indeed shot in their format.

Just thought I would share the news here in case anyone was wondering (I certainly was).

Now to see if I’ll actually be able to watch it both full-sized and in 2D as shot or if Disney is going to unnecessarily force the 3D version on the two of the Smithsonian’s three theaters that have already converted to the laser system. I certainly don’t see them paying to send a 15/70 print here when the only remaining Imax film theater is right across the National Mall from one of the lasers.

Wazzles said:

TV’s Frink said:

Wazzles said:

I sometimes watch the SE’s too.

Why?

For the heck of it. I watched Empire out of curiosity and found it surprisingly watchable. The Laserdiscs and look great (for Laserdisc) and sound absolutely incredible. I also find them interesting from both an historical and technological standpoint.

At least Irvin Kershner gave his blessing for the SE of Empire.

I also find the SE historically significant in its own way. A movie series of such popularity has never been so radically altered before or since. ANH SE long held the record (if it doesn’t still) for the highest-grossing January release in U.S. box office history.

SilverWook said:

Too bad there isn’t any big convention coming up where the OT question could be asked. 😉

I thought I remembered hearing about someone asking Kathleen Kennedy about it at one of the conventions after the Disney buy-out. But IIRC her answer was very neutral and diplomatic.

crissrudd4554 said:

CHEWBAKAspelledwrong said:

imperialscum said:

The way I see it, Disney should at least give a clear statement whether they plan to release OOT or not. At least Lucas was clear on this matter.

Except he wasn’t. He released it two years later, albeit in shitty quality.

Yes but he changed his mind again by the time the BDs were being done. There was an article that was published after the BDs came out about a fan at I believe a Q&A thing who politely asked Lucas why the original cuts hadn’t been included in the BD set. Keep in mind they had preceded the question by complimenting Mr. Lucas’ work and saying they were fans. According to the article Lucas rudely responded with ‘Grow up. They’re my movies’.

That quote’s validity was questionable IIRC. George did also say right around the same time “the original versions are too expensive to restore right now,” whatever the hell that was supposed to mean.

Wasn’t the validity of that quote disputed?

We should also remember that George changed his tune circa 2010 from “the original versions aren’t my vision for the saga” to “they’re too expensive to restore right now.” Ridiculous a statement as that was, it’s at least from before George sold everything to Disney. It’s not his money being spent anymore, it’s a humongous mega-corporation’s.

Plus there’s got to be something to that story John Landis told back in 2015.

I’m willing to at least wait until the big convention a couple months from now before I start declaring it a hopeless cause.

It’s arguably less hopeless now than it has been in several years. Lucasfilm obviously didn’t put out a gag order regarding the 4k restoration if Gareth Edwards talked openly about watching it.

Something is happening.

But if the convention comes and goes without a single word on the subject, that’s when we can start complaining.

Anakin saying that instead of “lightsaber” makes me think “Jedis” might’ve been intentional.

You think they’ll ever edit TPM so Jake Lloyd doesn’t say “Jedis” in his conversation with Liam Neeson?

Or was that intentional on George’s part?

I seem to recall Rick McCallum saying “Jedis” in one of the bts featurettes for one of the prequels.

crissrudd4554 said:

Fang Zei said:

crissrudd4554 said:

If something does happen this year and it’s not a repackaging of the 2011 discs I think it’ll be a 4K restoration release of ANH only. Waiting til 2020 doesn’t really matter in that films case. However restored unaltered cuts of ESB, ROTJ and the PT sounds likely after 2020 since Lucasfilm/Disney will now have full ownership of them plus 2020 marks the 40th anniversary of ESB. Just theory of course.

1997 only being ANH’s 20th didn’t stop them from releasing Empire and Jedi also.

Yes, I realize the rights to ANH will never revert to Lucasfilm, but I’m pretty sure Fox can’t release something new without getting LFL’s approval first. Otherwise they would face the wrath of Disney’s lawyers.

I’ve heard it argued that Fox effectively owns ANH since they control the distribution rights forever, regardless of what we’ve heard about them “gifting” it back to George in the 90’s in exchange for distribution rights on the PT. I feel like we still don’t know the whole story behind that. Zombie’s article on the subject, written in 2008 well before the Disney deal, suggests Fox did indeed hand the copyright over to Lucasfilm in the late 90’s: http://fd.noneinc.com/secrethistoryofstarwarscom/secrethistoryofstarwars.com/buyingstarwars.html

I know Fox would still need approval, I was just saying since they control the distribution rights for that film there’s no need to hold out til 2020 for Lucasfilm/Disney to get a 4K remaster of that film out on BD. The other films on the other hand I could possibly see them waiting it out til 2020 since Fox won’t be an obstacle. However as you pointed out there’s still likely elements to this whole ‘rights’ situation that hasn’t been explained so at the moment it’s all speculation.

What I forgot to say was that Disney probably wouldn’t want just one movie getting its own release without the other two as well. In fact, they would probably want all six getting reissued even if the only big deal is that IV-VI finally include the remastered original versions.

CHEWBAKAspelledwrong raises a good point. Streaming is only going to grow in the next several years as physical sales continue to decline. If Disney waited until 2020 to release anything new at all for I-VI they would risk losing people’s interest. I really can’t think of anything they could come up with to generate sales on reissues, other than the obvious.

Disney is stuck between a rock and a hard place. They can either give us the goods now and let Fox have their cut, or wait it out for several years and throw away the money they could’ve been making.

I’m still very curious to see how UHD will factor into all of this. Fox has supported the new format since day one, but Disney is yet to officially announce anything. If it were up to me, Lucasfilm would do a 40th anniversary release Blade Runner style, with separate SKU’s for regular and UHD blu. That way, people like me who still haven’t upgraded their hardware would be forced to buy the regular blu-ray in the meantime and the uhd version would still be there years from now when Disney’s regained the rights.

Or maybe Disney will simply keep the UHD in their pocket until 2020, but I find that unlikely since more and more people are upgrading to 4k and would be pissed to see I-VI (well, at least IV-VI) withheld when TFA and RO will likely be released on the format in the next year or so.

But the least likely scenario to me is having the same old 2011 discs reissued again and again for the next three years. The master is 13 years old at this point, we know they’ve done a new 4k master of some kind, and a 4k home video format exists. If there is any kind of new release announced for this year I would be shocked if it didn’t have some new disc-based content.

crissrudd4554 said:

If something does happen this year and it’s not a repackaging of the 2011 discs I think it’ll be a 4K restoration release of ANH only. Waiting til 2020 doesn’t really matter in that films case. However restored unaltered cuts of ESB, ROTJ and the PT sounds likely after 2020 since Lucasfilm/Disney will now have full ownership of them plus 2020 marks the 40th anniversary of ESB. Just theory of course.

1997 only being ANH’s 20th didn’t stop them from releasing Empire and Jedi also.

Yes, I realize the rights to ANH will never revert to Lucasfilm, but I’m pretty sure Fox can’t release something new without getting LFL’s approval first. Otherwise they would face the wrath of Disney’s lawyers.

I’ve heard it argued that Fox effectively owns ANH since they control the distribution rights forever, regardless of what we’ve heard about them “gifting” it back to George in the 90’s in exchange for distribution rights on the PT. I feel like we still don’t know the whole story behind that. Zombie’s article on the subject, written in 2008 well before the Disney deal, suggests Fox did indeed hand the copyright over to Lucasfilm in the late 90’s: http://fd.noneinc.com/secrethistoryofstarwarscom/secrethistoryofstarwars.com/buyingstarwars.html

Mocata said:

The problem is that the division between ownership of what Disney/Lucasfilm and Fox has is unclear, at least to me. Is it at all likely that a deal to spend money on this kind of thing for a new release would happen while another corporation has the reigns? Do the people that aim to profit from such a thing get along with the people that now own the negatives?

We have no way of knowing the answer to that.

I’m more and more convinced with each passing day that Disney will simply wait this out until they regain the rights to the non-ANH movies in 2020, disappointing as it would be to get absolutely nothing (aside from yet another repackaging) for the 40th anniversary this year.

Obviously I hope I’m wrong.

The 4k UHD format will be the other huge factor in whatever they decide on, I think. Disney will finally start supporting it in the next year or so and I don’t see them waiting long before releasing their wholly-owned Star Wars movies like TFA and RO. That will leave the first six movies conspicuously absent, but now we’re back to the whole conundrum of Fox owning the rights for at least another several years.

IIRC, George wanted to hold off the OT’s dvd debut until after the PT was finished. Maybe Disney will actually hold off the UHD debut of I-VI until after the ST is finished. It’s not like there will be a newer/better physical format right around the corner in 2020 like there was in 2005.

Tyrphanax said:

I assume there will be plenty of editing to be done to an official OOT restoration if we get one.

One nice aspect of Disney waiting until 2020/2021 is that it would give Lucasfilm time to do the most thorough restoration possible.

They can bring in the experts (Robert A. Harris, etc) instead of leaving everything at the mercy of someone who has no clue how these movies should look.

Mike Verta has already said the Reliance clips are nowhere near being accurate to the original look of the film. If their 4k “restoration” was only for George’s SE, then maybe that’s a good thing. It would allow the SE to be whatever George wants and the OOT to be properly restored.

lovelikewinter said:

If the GOUT was the result of people ripping laserdiscs to DVD, then Lucasfilm needs to do a real restoration to match what Harmy and other people are doing.

Bill Hunt called it years ago that someday people will get ahold of 35mm prints and scan them in and now it’s actually happened.

People captured the laserdiscs and converted them, lucasfilm took the actual digital master tape and released it on dvd. The analogous response to Harmy et al would be taking a superior source to theatrical prints (like IP, seps or the o-neg itself) and releasing it on blu-ray.

Mocata said:

Seeing what I have now in a box set thanks to Harmy and njvc, I don’t see how an official release can get much better than that!

Sure but it’s the principle of it.

Exactly.

Even Harmy doesn’t want his work to be the closest we’ll ever come to a true restoration of the films. He’s doing this in the hope that Lucasfilm will get around to it themselves, using film elements closer to the o-neg that literally no one else except maybe Fox possesses.

I feel like there’s no way Kathleen Kennedy hasn’t at least heard about despecialized. With any luck, Harmy’s efforts have lit something resembling a fire under the people in charge of these decisions at LFL.

Despecialized is great in the meantime, don’t get me wrong. It would be my hope that Harmy uses as many 35mm sources as he can to replace the altered shots for the 1080p version, getting it as close to a true restoration as he can without resorting to all the tricks he used in the early versions to “recreate” the unaltered shots.

emanswfan said:

Just a thought here, but like if a 4K Blu-ray release does really come out, isn’t it going to be impossible to use it as a basis for any further fanedits or preservations?

Best of my knowledge, there’s no way to RIP a 4K disc yet, or at least ripping an exact copy of it.

Not yet, but weren’t we all hearing ten years ago about how more studios were supporting blu-ray because it had an extra layer of copy protection (BD+ IIRC)?

Nevertheless, here we are, barely five years after the official BD release of Star Wars, with Harmy working on a 1080p version of despecialized.

It stands to reason that if people figured out how to rip blu-rays, they will figure out how to rip uhd blu-rays as well.

DominicCobb said:

Weird, had to check to make sure you’re right because that’s not what I remember, but yes it’s there (but only for the same reason it’s there in Avengers - the film was still distributed by Disney).

That’s certainly possible. Either way, anyone who doesn’t think Disney will start doing 4K releases of their own at some point is just fooling themselves.

Also my main point ended up being that it’s important to remember that Disney released the Phase One box set even though they only originally distributed one of those films, which is promising for SW.

Oh, I know Disney’s going to start releasing stuff on the format eventually. It’s just super annoying when all of the other major studios (even lionsgate) jumped on within only a few months and yet here we are almost a year later and probably looking at Rogue One being previous-gen format only. Hmmm, where have we seen that before with a Star Wars movie? Hint: I’m not talking about the GOUT, which was actually released several months after hddvd and blu-ray debuted.

DominicCobb said:

Iron Man 3 was the first Marvel film to only have the Marvel Studios logo

You’re thinking of Thor 2.

The Paramount logo is still there in Iron Man Three.

My main point with my long-winded post was that the overseas distribution rights for the three Iron Man films may very well have been signed away well in advance of Iron Man Three even being made. That’s why, all these years later, Concorde is able to put them out in UHD in Germany before Disney gets around to releasing anything on the format themselves.

CHEWBAKAspelledwrong said:

digitalfreaknyc said:

CHEWBAKAspelledwrong said:

Disney may soon be making an entrance to UHD BD (as in April soon). From Bill Hunt:

According to the German BD site Bluray-Disc.de, Disney and Marvel have licensed Iron Man, Iron Man 2, and Iron Man 3 to Concorde Home Entertainment for release in Germany on the 4K Ultra HD format on 4/6, both individually and as a Steelbook trilogy. You can see more here and also here.

If this is true, it would seem likely that a U.S. release is also soon to be announced. After all, the 4K Ultra HD format is all-region. It’s very hard to imagine Marvel and Disney sacrificing potential sales here in the States due to enthusiasts importing copies.

We know that Disney has been waiting for more Dolby Vision capability to start appearing in 4K hardware before joining the format and, as we reported at CES last month, Sony, TCL, LG, Vizio, and Philips have all agreed to support Dolby Vision in their displays and players. The new Oppo UDP-203 player will also support Dolby Vision after a forthcoming firmware update.

We’ve reached out to Disney to see if we can find out more on this and we’ll let you know if and what we hear back from them.

I’m really surprised to hear Bill say something uneducated like that. Movies coming out in other regions (from other studios) is about as indicative of a stateside release as seeing it on cable in HD. Or being able to buy it streaming.

One really has nothing to do with the other.

After all, the 4K Ultra HD format is all-region. It’s very hard to imagine Marvel and Disney sacrificing potential sales here in the States due to enthusiasts importing copies.

This was not the case for BD. Why would they let Concorde entertainment get cuts for American purchases when they could just release it themselves in the U.S.? Unlike with a BD, there is no region coding to protect against that and force American buyers to wait for a U.S. release.

The three Iron Man movies were part of the original distribution deal Marvel signed with Paramount. Disney ended up buying back the distribution rights for Avengers and Iron Man Three after buying Marvel in late 2009 (Iron Man 2, Thor and Captain America were still distributed by Paramount in the meantime). Paramount actually had nothing to do with Avengers’ release, not even theatrically. They just stipulated in Disney’s buyback that the Paramount logo remain in the movie. The same (I think) went for Iron Man Three the next year.

As I understand it, Paramount does have a certain degree of ownership over the Iron Man franchise that they don’t over the other standalone characters, kind of like how Disney can’t make a standalone Hulk film without Universal. A friend-of-a-friend who’s a screenwriter in Hollywood actually told me that Paramount has “continued interest” in the Iron Man franchise. Maybe that’s why Tony keeps showing up in these other movies but not his own?

Anyway, Concorde is the company puting the three Iron Man movies out on UHD in Germany, so I’m assuming they’ve got home video distribution rights there. I’m guessing they probably had a deal with Paramount and/or Marvel that predated and superseded whatever arrangements Disney made later on and there’s nothing they can do to stop this release. I’m reminded of how Close Encounters was the first Spielberg film to hit blu-ray because - as I heard it - it was made earlier in his career before he made sure to have things like signing off on the home video releases of his movies written into his contracts.

canofhumdingers said:

Fang Zei said:

Didn’t zombie write an entire article on savestarwars about his trip down to culpeper to help scan in and color-correct the LoC’s prints?

Maybe I’m remembering wrong, I couldn’t find the article on the site.

No that was me who went to culpeper. Nobody was “helping the LOC”. They’re professionals and do all their own scanning, restoration, etc. The trip was just an investigation of sorts to see what they really had in their collection because there was quite a bit of confusion at the time. The article never got finished because there were some disagreements behind the scenes and ultimately it was decided it was better for all to just drop it rather than have any party unhappy with the final publication. There was a preview posted temproarily but it was removed.

Ah okay, I kind of suspected that’s what I was misremembering after reading your post.

I can still remember reading that article and seeing the photo of the Library’s print of Jedi laid out on the light bed (or whatever it’s called) and my shock at how good it still looked after nearly thirty years. IIRC it was the shot where Luke cuts Boba Fett’s gun in half with his lightsaber. The color was still there in all its unfaded glory, from the orange sand to the glowing green saber blade.