Fang Zei

Just over two hours until I see this. It’s probably closer to two and a half since there’s bound to be a boatload of trailers.

Overall I feel way less spoiled going into this than I did for TFA, which is ironic since I feel like they’ve shown more clips (TFA only released one single clip if I’m not mistaken) and shown more in trailers and tv spots than they did for TFA.

The three-screen independent theater in the town where I went to college was going to show RotS until they found out how big of a cut GL wanted from the box office.

Even in their largest aud, which was pretty big and had a lot of seats, they would’ve needed to sell out every showing for a couple months just to turn a profit. They did show Crystal Skull there though, so maybe things broke down differently with Paramount.

There was a regal only six miles away where I ended up seeing it (my first midnight opening). It’s still there now. The independent theater, however, closed last year only a month or two before TFA was released.

I know they were one of the only two-hundred or so theaters in the U.S. showing Interstellar in 35mm, so at least they had a last hurrah.

Dave Chen of Slashfilmcast fame was just broadcasting live on twitter to share his spoiler-free thoughts on the movie now that the embargo has been lifted.

He mentioned that there are two cgi characters who look “terrible” from a vfx standpoint and singled one out as looking especially bad.

It only took me a few seconds to figure out that the character he must be talking about is Tarkin.

That’s disappointing to hear, but I can’t say I’m surprised. Bringing back Peter Cushing with computers just never sounded like a good idea.

On the other hand, I’m now very intrigued as to who this other cgi character is.

Ronster said:

It’s now time to stop looking at stuff I think… At least for me. Going to wait until I go to the cinema and see it.

George’s old flame might’ve said it best:

https://youtu.be/GI6mCtHcIvw

The theater closest to me here in DC (well, the closest multiplex, there’s a two-screen art house theater that’s even closer but it was never gonna show this movie) is doing the same thing it did last year for TFA.

They’ve got a 7pm 3D and a 10pm 2D. Last year this worked out perfectly since my sister and I had an event earlier that night and didn’t end up getting to the theater until 9 anyway.

This year (and this is probably a sign that Rogue One will do way better box office than I expected) I randomly got a mass text from one of my friends the morning after tickets went on sale saying that they’d already reserved seats for the 9am Saturday Dolby Cinema at Tysons.

There’s no way I was waiting until after Thursday night to see this thing. As it turned out, one of my friends works only five minutes from the Regal in Germantown, MD … and they were still selling tickets for 7pm in 2D. He’s got a ridiculously long commute everyday from Centreville, VA, so at least he’ll be able to drive back after rush hour’s ended.

I’ve already given the tickets to him and the mutual friend we’re seeing it with, just so I don’t have to worry about giving up my place in line just to give them their tickets. I plan on getting there at least an hour early, if not more.

At the end of Felicity Jones’ interview with Jimmy Fallon tonight they played what I’m fairly certain is the first clip we’ve seen of the movie. It’s from the shootout with the stormtroopers in the Mos Eisleyesque location. Giacchino’s music is very recognizable. My brain lit up with excitement.

I’m sure it’ll be up online soon if it isn’t already.

ETA: Here it is:

https://youtu.be/gMmmN3ey1YE

dahmage said:

All digital IMAX presentations will be 3d. Only 70mm film locations will have 2d.

I so feel like twisting my friend’s arm to go see it at the art house theater only three miles from where he lives, but I know it’s gonna be met with a resounding “no.” He likes his stadium seating and decently big screens at the very least, but he also hates putting up with your typical rude/inconsiderate multiplex audiences which is why he doesn’t want to see it at the mall either.

Ghost Protocol in 15/70 must’ve really ruined him on all other venues.

The placeholder showtimes on Smithsonian’s ticketing page has it listed as 3D for both Air & Space Museums (downtown DC and Udvar-Hazy in Chantilly, VA). This makes sense since both have converted to the laser system (which makes showing full-sized Imax 3D infinitely cheaper) and also since Lucasfilm didn’t show TFA in 2D at any laser locations last year.

Then again, Fantastic Beasts was also listed in advance on their site as being the 3D version but they’d changed it to 2D by the time opening day rolled around. Maybe something similar will happen with Rogue One, but I’m not holding my breath. Those of you who can see it in 15/70 are truly lucky.

My best friend from high school has had his heart set on getting a group together to see this at Udvar ever since early last month (Vader’s return to the big screen is a really big deal to him). If it does in fact end up being the 3D version, I’m positive my plea to not see it that way will mean nothing. My friend has perfect vision and also doesn’t care whether or not a movie was shot in stereo, so those are two things I got going against me. On the other hand, I’m way way way overdue for a new prescription. Maybe I can get contacts (I’ve heard you do not want to be wearing prescription glasses with 6p 3D systems) and just “go with the flow.” At the very least, the shots that are mostly/entirely cgi should look spectacular in natively rendered stereo.

Air & Space Udvar-Hazy out in Chantilly was one of the first Imax theaters in the world to convert to the new laser system. I saw the “formatted for (1.9:1) Imax” and entirely 2D Tomorrowland there only a few weeks after it reopened (just in time for Age of Ultron) and also caught the “partially shot in (actual 1.44:1) Imax” Batman v Superman there as well. Instead of simplifying things like Disney did with TFA (showing it in 2D at the 70mm locations and in 3D at the laser ones) WB decided to make some of the laser locations 2D and luckily Udvar-Hazy was one of them.* I noticed they did the same for Fantastic Beasts.

I only caught TFA once on the big screen (one of those very first (well, 10pm) thursday night screenings in regular-sized 2D) and meant to catch it again in 15/70 at the Air&Space in downtown DC if only to experience that one native-Imax scene in all its glory, but I only heard about their plans to close and convert to laser a couple days in advance … and I’d already made plans for that weekend.

A good friend of mine has had his heart set on getting a group together to see Rogue One at Udvar-Hazy ever since last month. He and his wife saw TFA there on New Year’s Day. They’ve both got good vision, so the 6p 3D method the laser system uses presumably wasn’t an issue for them. I wouldn’t mind seeing Rogue One there, even though it wasn’t shot in Imax like TFA,** but if it ends up being 3D-only at that location I might have to say forget it. Disney did that for Captain America: Civil War, which switches from 2.35:1 to 1.9:1 for a scene shot on the 65mm-sized Alexa, so my friends and I went all the way out to Manassas to see it in Liemax 2D. I’m not against seeing 3D movies when they were actually shot that way (The Martian for example), but otherwise I try to avoid it. Doctor Strange, which apparently had multiple 1.9:1 Alexa 65 scenes, was only shown in 2D in normal-sized constant-2.35:1 theaters. They didn’t even do 2D liemax screenings like they did for Civil War since Kevin Feige’s been hyping the shit out of the 3D all year.

*fun fact: apparently the projector chips in the new 4k+4k laser system are still the default digital cinema AR of 1.9:1 just like the smaller 2k+2k liemax theaters. In order to show full 1.44 movies they use a special anamorphic lens, which of course means the entire movie (including the 2.35:1 scenes) is actually stretched out and the vertical pixel resolution of the 2.35:1 scenes gets compromised. A movie like Rogue One will presumably not be compromised since it doesn’t have any 1.44:1 material and therefore doesn’t need to worry about filling the screen.

**I’d make an exception for Rogue One only because Edwards shot the entire thing on the Alexa 65 using the Ultra Panavision lenses Tarantino dusted off for Hateful Eight. That makes it worthy of the giant screen experience to me. Again, This is only if I can actually see it in giant-size Imax without the 3D.

DominicCobb said:

Speaking of casting…
http://www.starwars.com/news/emilia-clarke-joins-the-han-solo-stand-alone-film?cmp=smc|670804786&linkId=31337116

…eughhh.

Not only is she currently the weakest link on an otherwise fantastic show, she also looks exactly like Felicity Jones? I don’t know. We’ll see. Still hopeful.

I heard the news earlier tonight on imdb not two minutes after learning Carice van Houten played Leni Riefenstahl (perfect casting) in the Jesse Owens biopic.

Swazzy said:

I can’t tell, are the shots they use from ANH in that video off of the same blu ray master?

Paging Dr. Dre

I was wondering the same thing.

It’s too bad we have no real way of preserving the dlp version of AotC, nor the 120-minute 15/70 IMAX version released later that year. I still see people online mistakenly citing the extended garage scene as having been from the dlp version when I’m almost a hundred percent sure it wasn’t added until the dvd.

Remember when the first three Indy movies were quietly remastered in '08 from new scans? I think there were even new 35mm prints struck from that new master IIRC.

This kinda reminds me of that.

Hello, I’ve also been lurking in this thread without posting in it.

Please add me as well.

“I’m with ya too” and such.

How came they by these prints? I wonder.

I honestly never thought prints of the prequels would surface. Wouldn’t lfl had made sure every last one was returned to them? How did they just get out there like this?

Since there were only a handful of additional changes in '04 and 2011, it would probably be a simple matter of using seamless branching to include them on the same disc as the '97 version. Then the “final” and unaltered versions could each get their own discs.* So, in other words, this would be very similar to the blade runner set.

I think the '97 SE should absolutely be included. It’s what started this whole mess in the first place, so it provides historical context for future viewers. Also, as stated above, it was the first/last time in 20 years the films got a wide re-release in theaters.

*This assumes of course that the 2011 version isn’t already the final version, which we don’t know for sure. Tack said the roadshow screening he went to over the summer looked very different from the lowry master, but was still the 2011 version in terms of content. The 04/11 changes he said looked different from the rest of the movie, suggesting they were simply copy-pasted into the new master. If this version is in fact the final version, I’d still like the '97 version included on its own disc for history’s sake. I would obviously inderstand, though, if the unaltered version was the only other thing included.

By “day one” I’m assuming he means right after he was hired in May of 2014.

This thread was started only two months later.

Did the Ewok movies have wipes?

My guess for a while now has been that the movie will have a cold open (maybe the flashback we see in the final trailer) ending with a cut to black with the title fading in, fading back out and then fading in to the first shot of the rest of the movie.

Though I do wonder if the Lucasfilm logo will appear with music, sound effects, both, or with no sound at all.

Do any of the official site clips overlap with the brief snippets from RMW’s showreel?

CHEWBAKAspelledwrong said:

TV’s Frink said:

Didn’t this already happen before, and it turned out to be nothing exciting?

Someone had posted this a while back. 2011 rocks but 2004 krayt dragon call.

http://www.starwars.com/video/tusken-raider-attack

That video must have been added during the brief period after New Mexico became a state, but before Arizona did.

The plot thickens.

DrDre, have you tried comparing those clips with the blu-ray to see if the framing is different?

So I was thinking about the discussion from the previous page about aspect ratios.

It dawned on me that if you take 1.90:1 (the digital cinema AR) and multiply it by the 1.25 squeeze factor of the ultra panavision lenses you get, wait for it, 2.375:1.

So maybe it’s no accident that the final AR of Rogue One after you crop the sensor from 2.11:1 to 1.90:1 happens to basically be the same as the cinemascope AR.

Man, Disney is figuring out ways to cross-promote this stuff in ways Lucas never dreamed of.

Ronster,

I don’t think anyone is doubting that a restored unaltered would come packaged with the SE. That’s pretty much a certainty, so I don’t think there’s any danger of the unaltereds being released in single-disc editions and ending up in the bargain bin as you say.

I totally agree that the OOT packaged with a new SE is the way to go. It should be the bare minimum of how they approach such a release if they’re not going to throw in every version.

As for your argument about bootlegs, I think for every person out there who goes through the trouble of downloading Harmy’s DeED there are many more who would gladly fork over a few bucks for an official restoration straight from the source. You need look no further than what happened with the GOUT. They didn’t even need to remaster it and (I’m guessing) it still sold pretty well. I didn’t buy it on general principle alone but my point still stands.

Which brings me to your statements about “the kids today.” Look, if my highly-educated early millenial cousin and her husband with good-paying jobs who are several years older than me skipped upgrading their physical media to blu-ray in favor of a roku box streaming over dsl then that’s a bad sign. They’ve got a baby (and another on the way) who will probably grow up consuming all of their media over the internet and consider owning/renting optical discs a novelty.

We’re always hearing about how physical media is slowly dying and that downloads account for more than 50% of Hollywood’s home video revenue now. My nightmare scenario for the OOT continues to be Disney taking their sweet time (perhaps intentionally so) for another several years only to finally announce a restoration we can only legally purchase as a download/stream. The fact that there is a 2160p optical disc format following 1080p blu-ray is at least hopeful, and the copy-protection measures implemented on the new format tell me the studios are taking it seriously.