Fang Zei

As someone points out in the replies to that tweet, in May as much time will have passed since the release of TPM as had passed since the original Star Wars when TPM was released.

Anyway, 4k80 is roughly two-thirds done. Once it’s finished, the entire unaltered trilogy will be available for everyone to watch in not only full hd, but 2160p ultra hd as well. There won’t be any hdr versions (unless someone is working on that?), but this still feels like history repeating itself a little. A big reason the GOUT happened was because Lucasfilm realized how much money they weren’t making from all the fans who were acquiring fan preservations of the laserdiscs by downloading them for free or, worse, paying someone for a burned copy.

oojason said:

Given that George replaced Sebastian Shaw with Hayden Christensen for this scene in the 2004 Special Edition of ROTJ:-

 
I’m surprised George didn’t also replace Sebastian Shaw with Hayden Christensen for this scene below. Though maybe George was waiting until Hayden is somewhat older before filming it and then making the change…?

(Maybe there are plans to just change it for everyone’s Disney+ version / another Special Edition release at some point in the future! 😉 I’m just kidding, just kidding…)
 

The irony is that by 2026 the exact same amount of time will have elapsed since they shot RotS as passed in-universe between Anakin’s duel with Obi-Wan on Mustafar and RotJ.

Maybe we’ll finally see the Battle of Taanab.

Why did I hear somewhere that George was going to use digital de-aging tech on the OT actors? He mentions grandchildren in the interview. Was VII going to take place only a few short years after RotJ and then we jump way ahead PT-style for VIII and IX?

Anyway, what I find interesting here is how several aspects are in direct opposition to where the ST ended up going. Instead of stormtroopers that never quit, we got Finn’s storyline. Instead of Luke rebuilding the Jedi Order, he decides it’s time for it to end. Instead of the Emperor returning, it’s Darth Maul.

I don’t know how much of that thirty years between RotJ and TFA has been filled in yet outside of The Mandalorian, but I totally expect Lucasfilm to use at least some of these ideas for their future projects.

Could someone please explain which exact scene is being referenced here?

https://twitter.com/joefavs/status/1329645339834535936?s=21

I just realized that the director of Ant-Man had an actual ant man make an appearance in this episode.

Z6PO said:

Did you catch the format change? It went from CinemaScope aspect ratio to full screen HDTV for the action sequences!

I feel like I still noticed anamorphic bokeh in those full screen shots, so I’d be curious how they went about shooting that sequence.

I wasn’t paying super close attention to the sound, but recognized at least one version of it. Can’t remember now whether it was from ‘77, ‘04 or ‘11 (staying vague for people who wander in here without having watched the first episode of season 2, yes I know it’s the spoiler thread).

Anyway, not going to rewatch now just to listen for it again. But that was fun.

Barfolomew said:

I just caught this last week (we all knew they just had a wide expansion, right? 2000+ theaters) and I was stunned at how great it looked.

I presumed this was the new 4k master because it did not have the minty color timing of the blue rays, but looking up screen caps of the UHDs, they don’t at all look like what I saw in the theater. Much too murky and still had some of that “minty” look.

Thing is it really can’t be anything else, and I’ve noticed other movies that had rather obnoxious color timing on video or screencaps looked much more natural in the theater, I wonder why that is.

Yes, but were you watching at home on a calibrated display or just the out-of-the-box settings, etc, etc??

As far as I know, the version of Empire playing in theaters right now is still the 2004/2011 version off of that master (which, it’s worth mentioning, was only mastered by Lowry at 1920x1080 back in 2004, which isn’t even full 2k scope res).

I can’t speak for Empire, but I actually saw the 2011 bd of ANH projected in an actual movie theater several years ago and it looked surprisingly good shot out of a ridiculously expensive digital cinema projector. That might explain why Empire looked different from what you were used to.

JadedSkywalker said:

I think Villeneuve is deliberately going for a sort of real world realism, rather than the over the top ridiculousness of the Lynch version. I respect that. So far he hasn’t made a bad science fiction film.

It’s fitting that Villeneuve should make this his next project after Blade Runner 2049. Ridley Scott was the original director attached to the Dino De Laurentiis production in the late 70’s / early 80’s, and he ended up leaving the project to go direct Blade Runner.

Ridley Scott’s version, it’s worth noting, also would’ve split the book into two films just as Denis is doing here, with a style greatly influenced by Battle of Algiers.

rocknroll41 said:

dahmage said:

i doubt any plans involve ‘lets stop making money here’

None of the sequels are really all that “filmmable,” though. They’d almost be better off making up their own storylines, if they really wanted to continue this as a long-lasting movie franchise.

Like I said above, there is a streaming series in development, and I think they were originally aiming to have the first episode up on HBO Max by November in time for the movie. Obviously those plans changed, but we’ll see what happens.

All we know about the show is that it will center around the powerful Bene Gesserit Sisterhood, but no details on the story have come to light.

Denis Villeneuve mentioned in an interview over the summer that the disruptions caused to the post-production and pick-up filming schedule by covid are going to make it a real sprint to finish the movie on time now.

Yeah, Legendary Picture announced almost four years ago that they’d acquired both the film and streaming rights to the Dune franchise.

A lot of people keep referencing Warner Bros as if they’re the studio financing the movie, but they’re technically just the distributor.

That said, Legendary appear to have made a distribution deal with Warner Media over Dune, at least in the short term. WB is distributing this first film and probably at least the next one after (should it get made) and a streaming series called The Sisterhood is in development for HBO Max.

Williarob said:

Poita scanned this same Ep IV print on a professional grade film scanner, but never released anything beyond a few samples. He may have access to the other SE prints too, but if so (as far as I know) they have not yet been scanned.

That reminds me, I’ve been meaning to ask about how exactly the 4k77/80/83 projects were scanned. Over at TheStarWarsTrilogy, the text towards the bottom of the 4k80 page seems to imply that a professional scanner was used.

But from what you’re saying about Poita’s scan using a professional film scanner, am I to infer that’s not what you guys did for the 4k projects?

Williarob said:

Fang Zei said:

So a ‘97 35mm print of ANH was scanned, just not cleaned up?
Correct

Was this from Poita’s project?

No, this is our own scan of the same print.

What About Empire and Jedi?

Find us some prints and we’ll scan them.

I was under the impression that Poita had scanned or at least had access to all three of them, but I must be remembering wrong.

So a ‘97 35mm print of ANH was scanned, just not cleaned up? Was this from Poita’s project?

What About Empire and Jedi?

SilverWook said:

Was there still a time limit in 2005? Maybe Lucas didn’t want to make a shorter cut again.

As far as I know, they upped the limit from 120 minutes to 167 in time for The Matrix Reloaded’s release in May of 2003, and that was only two minutes shorter than RotS.

It was probably a combination of George wanting more time to work on the 35mm and digital versions of the movie (Imax probably needing more lead time to get the 15/70 prints made and shipped to theaters before release day) and the fact that Batman Begins was coming out in Imax only a month later.

It’s entirely possible that all of the Disney era films got released in 35mm in certain overseas territories where they’re not as far along in converting their theaters to digital, but the only Disney era Star Wars movie I’m absolutely sure got released here in the States in 35mm is TFA (I remember reading an article about it on slashfilm).

Thank you for the clarification about RotS, none. I didn’t remember any ads at the time saying it was playing in Imax, so now I know why that misinformation about it being shown that way got out there in the first place. Someone should really update the technical specs on imdb.

I wonder why RotS didn’t get the Imax treatment. Maybe there was some other big Hollywood movie opening in 15/70 within only a couple weeks of RotS (Batman Begins came out in Imax only a month later, so that might’ve been a factor). Maybe they needed more than two weeks to get the prints made and Lucas cared more about having the extra time to tweak the digital version. Who knows?

AotC got an Imax release only a week before (or was it a week after? can’t remember now) the dvd hit shelves. The Imax projectors’ platters could only hold 120 minutes of film running at 24 frames a second, so the movie had to be cut down to that length. Presumably the end credits were time-compressed to keep as much of the actual movie as possible. By the time The Matrix Reloaded hit theaters the following May, the platters had been modified to hold 167 minutes of film. Notice we’ve never gotten a movie released on actual Imax film prints since then with running times going over that (Watchmen, Avatar and Dark Knight Rises all came close, and Interstellar had to compress its end credits to shave off two extra minutes).

The technical specs for RotS on its imdb page list 70mm Imax as one of the printed film formats, but I’m not sure how accurate this is.

There were a small number of 35mm prints made for TFA. This was probably done at the behest of JJ Abrams. There were, apparently, also 35mm prints made for TRoS, but I don’t remember hearing about it like I did with TFA. To the best of anyone’s knowledge, no 35mm prints were made for TLJ.

There were no regular 5-perf 70mm prints made for the PT and ST movies.

I totally read this as “the holiday special will air on Disney +” and did a huge double take.

StarkillerAG said:

SilverWook said:

StarkillerAG said:

In my opinion, the original Star Wars will only be released after George Lucas dies. Disney clearly wants the original versions to be released, but they will never have the guts to go against his wishes while he’s still alive. After he dies, they’ll probably still hold off the release for a few years in order to avoid seeming insensitive, but after a while they’ll release the original.

After dumping his final production Strange Magic and blowing off his ideas for the sequels, I have doubts that they are really that considerate of his wishes.

But those were done in a very low-key way, not really in public view. I doubt they’d go against Lucas’ wishes publicly, especially not to the degree of visibility that a release of the OOT would have.

Except I seriously doubt George cares anymore at this point. He released the unaltered cuts on dvd. Laserdisc ports, sure, but he did release them. He even changed his tune circa 2010 from “the unaltereds aren’t my vision for the saga” to “they’re too expensive to restore right now.” He let the Academy screen a 70mm of the ‘81 ANH just last year.

When he sold Star Wars for $4 Billion, he let it go.

George is not the problem anymore, it’s Disney.

Now, it might very well be the case that the bean-counters have decided the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. It might also be the case that they’re simply sitting on an OOT restoration intentionally biding their time. I swore up and down that people would not be nearly as enthusiastic about spending their money on “Jedi Rocks but in 4k hdr this time” after three rounds of revisions to these classics. It could turn out that Disney simply wanted to cash in on the latest format and still has the OOT in their back pocket for when the well dries up.

Time will tell.

Rodney-2187 said:

I don’t think it is possible for anyone to ever release any sort of restoration on any part of the Original Trilogy that wont immediately be regarded as inferior to what is actually desired.

True, but 4k83 in theory gets pretty darn close to what’s desired since it’s from a show print directly off the negative.

4k77 uses a tech print which is also, theoretically, closer to the resolution of the camera negative than any run of the mill print could provide.

I’m not sure what’s being used for 4k80.

Disney has every motivation they could possibly need to restore and release the original versions. They paid $20 billion more than they’d originally planned (which was already something like $50 billion) to buy 20th Century Fox thanks to the bidding war they ended up in with Comcast. The original Star Wars was one of the films they gained the rights to in the buyout, along with the other five pre-ST films. Are we really to think 2020 was the last time we’ll see a new release of these movies?

With all of the talk these days about how movie theaters are hurting financially, it would sure make Disney look good if, let’s say, three years from now they were to release an unaltered OOT restoration in theaters and have that be the only way you could see it. They would of course announce a home release months later, but the message they’d be sending in the meantime about how they respect the history of their films and how much it means to their fans, not to mention the importance of the theatrical experience, would ultimately benefit their bottom line.

There was speculation on these boards as to whether or not the ‘97 cg shots were transferred directly from the digital filmout tapes for the 2019 4k version à la the 2011 rebuild of TPM or if they were simply scanned back in from the negative just like any other shot in the movie.

There was also speculation somewhere (maybe it wasn’t here) that the ‘97 re-comps were re-done from scratch yet again to take advantage of the higher resolution.

Has any evidence emerged to support either of these theories?

Y’know, it never occurred to me to wonder about this until now, but did Lucas plan on having Clive Revill play the emperor in Episode VI when he cast him as the hologram voice in Empire?

doubleofive said:

Vladimon said:

Stotchy said:

Not sure what FHD is?

FHD Full HD (1080p)
UHD Ultra HD (4K)

I was asking about the the 2020 FHD blu-rays that came out with the 4k ones. But I guess since those come from the same “new” sources as the 4K versions, the colors, the tighter framing etc. are identical to those of the 4k ones. Minus the higher resolution and HDR ofc.

Keep in mind those are only available in the box with the 4K, the individual releases are still the 2011 version.

And it seems the only reason they did that was because they didn’t want to have the newer 4k-derived transfer out there in any form (not even as a regular 1080p blu-ray) until it debuted on day 1 of Disney+ and then later in physical form with the UHD release. But now, simply because they wanted the individual blu’s out there when they did, it’s going to create confusion for people who see identical cover art to the 4k expecting it to contain the newer transfer. (EDIT: SilverWook and Broom Kid basically beat me to it)

Were the 2011 versions ever released as just dvd-only or were they only included with the dvd/bd trilogy combo packs that came out in 2013? If it’s the former then we might be looking at a repeat here, only minus the trilogy part.

Also, were the OT films (any version) ever released on dvd individually outside of the 2006 GOUT?