Fang Zei

That's the exact example I was going to bring up. And unlike the situation with Batman, where the relevant parties simply didn't foresee the long term consequences of their copyrights, the Disney buyout of LFL just happened recently. We've already seen them work things out over the matter of digital distribution. There's no reason to think they can't come to an agreement over other forms of media.

That's a crazy story about Hamill, Anchorhead! What form were they in? Film reels?

The situation with Fox wouldn't really have any bearing on the OOT specifically. As far as I know, their ownership extends to any and all versions of ANH but everything else belongs to Lucasfilm.*

Between 3D and 4K, there are two more opportunities to squeeze more money just out of the SE. But like I've said before, those still aren't good enough reasons to get people to shell out for these movies in significant numbers yet again.

*I've heard some people incorrectly speculate that that's why Lucas created the SE in the first place, to get his own copyright on ANH.

Yeah that looks weird and yet - even in lego form - oddly JJ-esque.

DominicCobb said:

Bingowings said:

Ridley Scott is still a strong visual director but he allowed himself to be associated with a script mangled to death by Lindelof.

It's interesting that every time Lindelof is involved with something people always blame him for its perceived failures. If I remember from what I read, the main issues people have with Prometheus were Scott induced issues, a lot of them in the editing phase.

Not that it really matters in regards to TFA. Lindelof has nothing to do with that.

I like Super8 and Cloverfield but his first Star Trek is as bad/good as any TNG movie and the second one is truly painful in places. He didn't write the screenplay but he allowed himself to be closely associated with it. He is allowing himself to be closely associated with TFA.

But he wrote the screenplay to TFA, he didn't just allow himself to be closely associated with it. The challenge of directing a Star Wars movie vs. the challenge of directing a Star Trek movie is completely different. Sorry Trekkies, but the Star Wars one is a bigger challenge. Abrams is not a Trekkie - that's why they brought him on as director, so that he could reimagine the franchise and make the film engaging for everyone (I'm not saying that's what the film needed, but certainly it was what the execs wanted and it worked). Abrams is a huge Star Wars fan. That's exactly what TFA needs. Someone who loves the franchise (read: the good parts of the franchise) and who understands that if he effs this movie up he won't just be disappointing the whole world but himself too. Hence why he threw away the original, Lucas-story script and wrote a new one from scratch with Kasdan.

A friend of mine has been very skeptical of Episode VII because JJ Abrams "likes to change things."

Your last paragraph there pretty much sums up my response to him.

I know there was no way in hell we were ever going to get the Fox fanfare in front of TFA, but it's still too bad the opening of the film will be missing that certain something.

It wouldn't surprise me if the next official alteration to 1-6 simply removes the Fox logo and fanfare entirely, including from ANH.

If TFA is simply opening with the Lucasfilm logo, I think it would be better to just not hear anything before the main theme. I'm surprised that isn't what they did for the digital release of 1-6.

He said he knows several people working on the vfx for TFA at ILM and that they've told him it's not, in their opinion, going to be a particularly good movie.

I don't doubt he was told this, but he only discussed it in the vaguest of terms. Perhaps he was told more by his friends and didn't want to get them in trouble.

Apparently there are conflicting rumors regarding the next trailer.

A theater in Vancouver says it's dropping October 19th, also when tickets supposedly go on sale.

The other rumor claims we're not seeing it until November but that it is already done and being looked at by the people at corporate, along with some tv spots.

Disney's also going to want to start promoting Captain America: Civil War soon as well. They're gonna be keeping those trailer dates as far away from each other as they can.

DuracellEnergizer said:

Fire whoever's been giving the shitty new comics and novels the stamp of approval and replace them with someone who'll actually say a great big "NO!" to schlock stories.

Abandon the stupid concept of "canon" once and for all and let the writers write whatever stories they may in whatever continuity they wish (be it a previously established continuity or their own personal continuity).

Cancel all the ongoing Star Wars comic series and replace them with a single SW series -- an anthology series containing multiple stories per issue focused on a wide variety of characters from various timeframes. 

Publish fewer novels.

That's it -- that's all it would take to improve the nuEU for me.

Here's the funny thing about the old canon: nothing was ever explicitly de-canonized. Even the Holiday Special counted, on some level.

Which brings us to the whole concept of different levels of canon.

Which is half the reason the EU was rebooted in the first place.

What did George think of the Thrawn trilogy? Obviously he gave the OK for post-Jedi stories to be told, and I remember hearing about how he liked the Dark Empire comic.*

Did the EU just get away from him later on or was it always intended as a cash grab from the very beginning?

Like, he also gave the OK to kill off Chewie in Vector Prime.

I get the impression that the EU writers were leaving a contingency plan for the eventual Episode VII but that George was leaving no such plan for the EU. It simply didn't count, in his view.

*Although, Dark Empire contains one of the three big post-Jedi EU things that George said never happened in that now infamous quote.

Wazzles said:

towne32 said:

Mike O said:

but why spend the tons of money and time on a restoration of a version with a tiny existing interested group of purchasers when the existing versions, for which they already have HD masters, are selling like heroine?

 If they ever want to release in 4K (and not just an upscale), they'll need to either release the 1997 version as-is, or spend money modifying them in some way. That could mean re-building something that resembles the 2011, the OOT, or both. 

 Well not even the 97's as-is would work. AFAIK, the CGI is rendered in like 2k. So to release the current version (or something that resembles it, they would have to re-render the added CGI from 97, 2004, and (probably) 2011, and then upscale the content shot digitally (the Emperor in ESB, Hayden in RoTJ). No matter what, releasing the SE in 4k will be some sort of a pain in the ass. It's likely that the OOT may be easier to restore at 4k since there is no CGI, save for a few wire-frame models that would look fine regardless. 

 They wouldn't have to redo the cgi.

It would be no different from plenty of other movies over the past decade that were 4K DI finishes with 2k vfx renders.

The only real question is whether George is still satisfied with the '97 cgi after all these years. But even if he's not, it's now Disney who controls the purse strings. I doubt they would bother.

SilverWook said:

And I would probably suffer the SE's just one more time if they were shown theatrically in 3-D.

I think a lot of people would, which is why I'm convinced it will happen eventually.

We do live in a world now where The Shield, a show shot on 16mm film, is being remastered in 4K. So I guess anything' possible.

Wally Pfister's expert opinion was that you'd have to scan in 35mm negative at somewhere between 8k and 12k res to really get all the detail it's capturing.

It's just that 8k is prohibitively expensive right now for anything other than capturing and scanning.

Really.

That's because, for starters, 8k is overkill for 4-perf 35mm film.

Also, the vfx shots in TFA, which I'm assuming will make up a pretty sizable percentage of the movie, will not be rendered at anything higher than 4K except for the shots in that one IMAX scene.

When most of your movie is stuck at 4K to begin with, you're not going to gain much of anything by mastering it at a higher res.

On that note, does anyone want to start taking bets as to when the next/final trailer is gonna drop?

Ryan McAvoy said:

Ronster said:

HDTV Broadcasts are already in terms of quality going to fall behind and how on earth will 8K get transmitted through the air.

Maybe because there will always be bandwidth limits on how high you can go, physical media will make a come back. 2K streaming and 8K physical discs. PT streaming online, and ST and restored OT on 8K Blu-Ray discs ;-)

Seeing as how the ST will likely not be finished at anything higher than 4k, probably not.

The Ugnaughts are supposed to be from the nearby Anoat system if I remember the old EU correctly. I always thought they were saying "The No-Add system" until I turned on the dvd subtitles.

Anyway, McQuarrie's floating islands of moss with their humanoid inhabitants flying around on thrantas is something I could see being added into the background of the Bespin arrival (before we actually see Cloud City) or just added editorially like they did with the cloud car that flies past Leia's room.

It was probably a stretch in '97 when all they could do was add the refinery, another McQuarrie concept, into the foreground of one of the shots. But now that we're in a post-Avatar world, showing the native lifeforms of Bespin would certainly be possible.

Speaking of Bespin, it would be cool if they added all the crazy stuff from the McQuarrie paintings for a future "ultimate" SE. As it stands, it's the only planet we see without any indiginous life whatsoever. Yavin IV at least had trees.

This is why it wouldn't be surprising if Disney/Lucasfilm simply commissioned an SE 2.0 to not only redo stuff that wouldn't work in 3D but also fix blatant vfx errors still present in the 2011 version.

John Doom said:

What about ROTJ in 3d?

"Masters of Teras Kasi takes place between ANH and TESB."

Sense: that video makes none.

It will happen eventually, if only because they've finished converting the PT and the ST will also be in 3D.

If we consider that RotJ would be hitting theaters in 3D less than a year and a half from now (if they'd actually kept to the original, pre-disney schedule), it wouldn't be surprising if they simply decided to get it done now, ahead of Episode VII.

So here's a question, unanswerable at the moment but I'll throw it out there anyway.

Do you think Disney will put out Episode VII on 4K blu-ray day and date with the regular blu-ray or are we looking at a similar situation to TPM where they stagger the releases on the different formats?

Granted we'll be much earlier in the life of this new format than dvd when TPM came out, so it actually wouldn't be unreasonable for Disney to hold back on it. They did something similar with that second Pirates movie on regular blu-ray.

Crystal Skull and the Clone Wars movie were both day and date blu-rays back in the earlier days of the format, although - at least in Crystal Skull's situation - it helped that the format war had officially ended and Paramount was no longer putting out movies on hddvd. With no format war this time around, Disney might just want to get their biggest title out there in the best available format as soon as possible.

In any event, I see the release of the other six movies on the new format as an inevitability. Yes, even the prequels. Most of the initial titles from Fox were only finished in 2k anyway, it's the expanded color and hdr they want to show off. The prequels can still benefit from the former but maybe not the latter.

CatBus said:

I've found torrents to be a perfectly adequate substitute for patience.

You'd think Lucasfilm would've caught on to that by now.

Just as the proliferation of the ld-to-dvd fan preservations led to an official unaltered dvd release, we're now at the point where we have a perfectly serviceable substitute for an unaltered blu-ray.

Not clicking on that link as I don't want to go in knowing too much (didn't I say I was gonna stay out of this thread entirely?), but I do recall the early rumors saying something about the third act having a huge "I am your father" level twist/reveal.

The overall sentiment I've been getting from those in-the-know has been that TFA is most similar to ANH tonally but has a very cliffhanger-y, Empire style ending.

SilverWook said:

Would be a way for Lucasfilm to make the 3D conversions finally pay off.

Were all six shown in 3D at Celebration this year?

No, just the PT.

It was the first time RotS was shown in 3D if I'm not mistaken. I wasn't there, not even on the same coast, but I've shared my thoughts in the past about how three-dimensional RotS already looks in regular 2D projected on blu-ray. Assuming they didn't drop the ball on the conversion, it must look amazing.

Meanwhile, several signs point to this new 4k remaster of the OT having been done years ago, maybe even as early as 2008-2010. It takes a year to really do a thorough conversion of a two-hour movie into 3D. Titanic, a 3-hour movie, took more than a year. If the new 4k scan/remaster was ready before Disney even bought Lucasfilm, then they've had three years to convert the three movies.

On the other hand, I feel like we would've actually heard something about it by now.

I'd actually forgotten about that, joefavs. I could go and double check but I'm pretty sure you're right.

The bigger question in my mind is whether the rumored in-theater saga marathons on December 17th will be DCP's of the 2011 version or an unannounced debut of the 4k SE.

If they're showing the marathon in 3D, I would fully expect the latter.

Can you imagine the crowd's reaction seeing Han shoot first again?

Either way, it still won't be the OOT.

The steel books and the complete saga reissue will undoubtedly be fresh pressings of the discs, so it's not impossible for there to be differences from the 2011 version.

But it would be pretty weird to just make that one change (or rather, a reversal of a change), and to make it now, only a month before the new movie's release.

I actually do give credence to the original rumor from April, but I honestly don't expect to see Han shooting first (shooting only?) again until the 4K remaster makes its way out there.