Fang Zei

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.

Totally forgot about those.

They could just give us only the SE on the 4k UHD release, but they should be smart enough by now to know - 4k or no 4k, HDR or no HDR - that no one cares about buying the original movies yet again unless it’s the original versions.

If I had a penny for every time I’ve read some random person’s facebook / comment section post about wanting the original versions on blu-ray, I’d be an eleven thousandaire.

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.

crissrudd4554 said:

Ryan-SWI said:

crissrudd4554 said:

Says you.

Mature.
Fox owns the rights, but it’s not as simple as that, and I have no idea why everyone on these forums seems to think Fox can just jump up and say “Yes! It’s time to distribute the OOT on 4K!” anytime they want.
There’s a lot of legal hoops they need to jump through with Disney and Lucasfilm. The digital releases were missing the 20th Century Fox logo or is everyone forgetting that? Oh right but it’s clearly as simple as Fox just deciding to do whatever they want, they must have decided to omit their logo from the beginning of those releases just because they felt like it.

For the record Fox retains distribution rights for the original Star Wars, it does not own all the prints for the original Star Wars or the right to scan and/or alter anything without the approval of Lucasfilm and by extension, Disney.

Conflicts of interest and contractual legalities are enough to throw a huge wrench in the works for anything like this. Shutting down discussion that doesn’t align with the hivemind doesn’t change that.

I want a 4K release just as much as anyone but expecting one this year or anytime soon is lunacy and I’ll eat my hat if it happens. Feel free to hold me to that.

I never said Fox can just release it when they want. I was just saying ANH will be distributed through into the foreseeable future provided of course Lucasfilm wants them too. Lucasfilm is really the ones in charge of where the movies are going.

As far as the OOT never being released, I don’t think it’ll be this year but in the future who knows?? Studios always want excuses to resell their shit and simply giving out the same SE everytime is gonna get to a point where that’s not enough of a selling point. But if you are positively, absolutely, truly, undoubtedly, with out a doubt, no second thoughts whatsoever, totally convinced it will never happen well more power to you. But let those who are still holding out hope to their business and dreams, as potentially hopeless as they may be.

I would argue it’s already gotten to that point.

They’ve sold us the same discs three times in a row now.

It’s no different, except for the fact that there’s now the ticking clock of Fox completely losing all rights to the non-ANH stuff in 2020 when they revert to Lucasfilm and therefore Disney.

Lucasfilm could authorize a release in the next year or two, of course, but there are multiple factors playing into all of this.

The fact that we now know for sure that there’s been a new scan of the OT is reason enough for Lucasfilm to say SOMETHING by the time Celebration rolls around. They really can’t continue to ignore the elephant in the room.

Also, I just don’t see a new home video release (one that isn’t simply another recycling of the 2011 discs) happening unless it’s also the debut of these movies on the new 4k format. Sure, they COULD choose to make the remastered OOT’s release regular blu-ray only, but I feel like it’s too late for that now. Every 4k release so far has included a regular blu-ray copy for schmucks like me who want to future-proof everything.

Assuming that Lucasfilm isn’t going to simply give us only the SE yet again (now in 4k!) and that they’ll make each OT movie a two-disc thing at the very least, they’d probably have to forgo including a regular blu-ray on the 4k release since it would be too many discs. They would probably do a separate, 1080p SKU kind of like how Blade Runner didn’t bother including a regular dvd copy with the blu-ray and hd-dvd releases.

That said, way more people have regular blu-ray players at this point than 4k, and a remastered OOT would sell like crazy. Sure, it’s going to piss off those of us who’d like to future proof our media, but like I said, if it’s a multi-disc release then they probably wouldn’t include a regular blu-ray in the 4k package anyway.

As said, Disney is dragging their feet in terms of jumping on to the new format, although we pretty much know for sure it’s happening in the next year or so. They probably wouldn’t want the Fox-distributed movies hitting 4k before TFA and RO. At the very least I’m sure they’d want their own Star Wars movies hitting the format at the same time if not first.

But, like I said, maybe we’ll see a remastered OOT on regular blu-ray in the next year or so and then Disney will wait until 2020/2021 to put the entire I-IX saga out in a 4k collection, having worked out a deal with Fox to include ANH.

Not off topic at all!

I asked the very same thing only a couple weeks ago.

Y’know, we’re always talking about how the unaltered OT is the only thing they have left to sell us so far as those movies are concerned.

I’d pay good money for an “all versions” collector’s edition of AotC. The 35mm, dcp and final/most-recent version could all be branched onto the same disc. They could put the imax cut on a second disc just like one of the dvd releases of Apollo 13.

Hey, it’s an idea!

I wonder what’s going on with Jedi.

It’s the only one absent from RMW’s reel and Fraser doesn’t mention it in his interview.

baron_lando said:

The text of the books has never been changed, it’s just one of those things that some fans believe ought to happen, so it comes up every so often, or they ask Hidalgo about it. “New novelizations to better fit the blah blah continuity blah blah consistent with blah”

I could’ve sworn I read years ago that it actually was changed, but everyone’s reply tells me I’m wrong.

It’s possible I’m mistaking it in my memory for the shock of finding out that Owen being Obi-Wan’s brother was actually written into the book and then never changed even after the prequels blatantly contradicted it.

It might have been one of the more recent printings, but this was still at least ten or so years ago.

Either that or my memory is completely wrong on this.

Wasn’t there an alteration made to Jedi’s novelization at some point? They removed a reference to Owen being Obi-Wan’s brother. I’d be curious to know which edition was the first to feature this change.

I’d also be curious to know if any changes were made to the novelizations of Star Wars and Empire.

(In reply to Wazzles’ post):

From Zombie’s article on the subject over at Saving Star Wars:

“The 1985 interpositive was already starting to go pink in 1993 when that release was made, the final home video telecine. By 2020, it will be pink, but salvageable, but all release prints would basically be unwatchable as-is, even Return of the Jedi’s.”

http://savestarwars.com/filmpreservation.html#ch5

That’s a good point, doubleofive.

Why do they keep “finding” these things?

Very True.

I think people get way too hung up on the SE’s vfx being “only” 2k when that’s still the case for movies being made almost two decades later.

The same podcast where I heard that info about Catching Fire and Interstellar (fxguide, if anyone’s wondering) also did an interview with Lola where they talked about The Vision in Avengers: Age of Ultron. When the host asked what res they were working at, he very specifically said 3.4k, which happens to be the same res the movie was shot at. Granted, they didn’t handle all of the effects shots in the movie, but I wonder why they would bother if it was just gonna get finished at 2k.

For what it’s worth, imdb lists it as a 2k finish. I can’t help but wonder if there are 3.4k files of the finished movie sitting somewhere at Disney just waiting for a 4k HDR grade.

Doug Trumbull beautifully illuminated the main cause of the problem when Scott Wilkinson interviewed him on Home Theater Geeks a year or so ago.

The problem doesn’t have to do with saving storage space (at least I don’t think it does). Rather it’s the fact that rendering 4k vfx shots on these big tentpole films where you have a ton of effects shots - most of the shots in the entire movie, in fact - is more expensive than simply settling for 2k. The studios also love to bid these effects houses against each other knowing they will give the lowest possible rate out of fear of losing the job to another company. When most of the finished shots in your movie are stuck at 2k, there’s little point in doing a 4k DI.

From what Harmy was saying earlier in the thread, this might’ve changed in the last year or so. I remember hearing as far back as three years ago that the vfx work on Hunger Games: Catching Fire was all in 4k. Same goes for Interstellar a year later, although this one makes a little more sense since Nolan always finishes his movies photochemically and likes to do as much “for real” and in camera as he can.

As said, imdb is not the best source for DI info. TFA had more vfx shots than TPM. If they were only finished in 2k, I’d say the movie is effectively stuck at thay res.

stealthboy said:

Fang Zei said:

I was scrolling through facebook and noticed someone had done a fan-made saga trailer.

One of my biggest problems with the prequels is that George decided to shoot 2 and 3 on glorified HD video cameras and they look terrible compared to the other films.

And now they can’t be re-scanned at 4K like film can. Ooops!

To me it’s more the fact that those cameras’ sensors were only 2/3", or less than the area covered by regular 16mm, nevermind regular 35mm.

I’m sure George considered this ahead of AotC, but he probably figured the drop in frame area was worth it just so he could abandon film for digital.

Since shooting digital was such a new thing in general back in 2000, this also meant abandoning the 2x anamorphic lenses used to shoot the OT and TPM on 35mm (aka true CinemaScope) for spherical lenses.

Those are my two biggest problems: the smaller frame size and the lack of anamorphic lenses.