This is why I'll be absolutely shocked if, in addition to a restored OOT, they don't also release a polished "final cut" of the SE by the time ep7 hits. The 2004/2011 master is a joke at this point.
Y'know, I guess it's oddly appropriate for Episode VII's title to resemble The Force Unleashed, even unintentionally.
That was also hyped as "The Next Chapter" in the saga.
DuracellEnergizer said:
I don't hate it, but it does bring to mind an image of a giant, sparking Force ghost yawning as he wakes up from a long nap.
Then I guess Spielberg's timing with the BFG was pretty good!
It also makes sense if the first ultra-early teaser trailer is just around the corner, as has been rumored. The titles for the three prequels were announced only a couple months before we saw the first trailer, which was only six months before the film's release.
There is that.
I've never downloaded/acquired any, so I guess my conscience is clean on that front.
Heh, I feel another title nitpick coming on. This reminds me of when Dawn of the Planet of the Apes was announced and everyone was like "Doesn't the dawn come before the rise?"
As an aside, it would be great if Peter Suschitzky shot one of these umpteen Star Wars movies currently in development. He just shot After Earth for Shyamalan recently, digitally on the Sony F65, so another Star Wars, regardless of format, wouldn't be his first Space Opera since Empire.
I always found it funny that he ended up becoming the cinematographer for one of the guys who could've directed RotJ, David Cronenberg.
At first I was dissapointed that the title had anything to do with the force, although this is still better than having Jedi or Sith in the title. It's just that we already had a much-hyped Star Wars event (granted, it wasn't a movie) where The Force was also the first two words of a three-word title.
...Then I realized how it works on a subconscious level, reminding us how the franchise is "awakening." Sure, it has a symmetry with the three-word titles of the first parts of the other trilogies (and Empire is the only one aside from TPM to start with "the," so there's that), but more than anything else they're appealing to our feelings of the franchise itself.
Episode VII probably won't specifically follow either version. It will probably only reference stuff that all versions of the OT share in common.
At the most we'll get a "Han shot first" joke, a wink to the audience.
It was just how the media referred to it, since the first film was simply titled Star Wars.
When you think about, that must've been a cool, clever way of surprising everyone. It's like "oh, by the way (like it's nothing), this is Episode V, not Episode II."
I wonder what all the fanzines and newspapers (and, heck, the nascent internet) made of it in the days after Empire hit theaters.
People wouldn't have even been familiar with the concept of Star Wars movies having episode numbers until May of 1980.
As for the title being smaller, that might just be the mystery box at work and them thinking it would be a fun way visually to unveil the title. I'm sure the marketing departments at Lucasfilm and Disney are gonna be busy trying to come up with a catchy-looking logo a la Empire and Jedi. The selling points for all three prequels were the "filling in the blanks" of Episodes I, II and III, hence that was the biggest part of the logos. Episode VII is, arguably, an equally big selling point, but I think they want to avoid anything that will remind people of the prequels in the marketing.
I remain very curious as to how they're going to open the movie without the Fox fanfare. At this point I'm assuming Johnny's just gonna come up with a new piece of music to play over the Disney and Lucasfilm logos and then the rest of the opening will be identical from there.
There are literally thousands of blu-ray releases out there more worthy of your cash than the 2011 Star Wars set. The deleted scenes, which should've been on the '04 dvd anyway, were pretty much the only selling point imo. That wasn't enough to get me to buy what was essentially the '04 hd master at its full resolution and with a few tweaks.
Episode VII's production has managed to generate enough consistent buzz to distract from the complete and total lack of any OOT news whatsoever. Disney's radio silence on the matter is the reason we flipped out both times those rumors popped up.
But they can't expect to just keep ignoring the gigantic elephant in the room. Maybe something really is blocking them from releasing the originals, I just find that hard to believe. If Fox and WB can work out an agreement over the Adam West Batman series, I really don't see what's stopping Fox and Disney. Could George have made it a condition of the sale to Disney? It's possible, but I think $4 Billion speaks a little louder than that. The only other possibility is the rumor of people at Fox feeling "uncomfortable" having anything to do with a restored OOT release while George is still alive.
I have a feeling the radio silence may be part of the plan. By April/May we will have heard something.
Don't spend a cent on the 2011 set.
Lucas waiting two whole decades and not doing any credited directing in all of tnat time are two big strikes against the prequels that the Hobbit movies don't have. It helps that LotR was made after the digital vfx wave had really got going, so that even the cgi overload of The Hobbit doesn't seem too out of place by comparison. The RED cameras are a much closer match to the Super 35 of LotR than the sony 2/3" hd cameras are to the cinemascope of TPM and the OT. You can bet that if The Hobbit actually had gotten made pre-2009, they would've just shot it on film.
The comparison comes from doing the prequel (written first by Tolkien before he wrote LotR) after you've already told the "main" story on film. You suddenly feel the need to force all these connections to the originals. The irony is that the Star Wars prequels, titled episodes 1-3, feel so disconnected from the ones titled 4-6 while a movie of the Hobbit, which could've done its own thing, feels bolted to a movie titled Lord of the Rings.
Bingowings said:
Ironically I have more HD-DVDs than Blu-Rays and I have nothing to play them on thanks to that flipable Star Trek OS remastered box set of mine.
Haha, wow, you just brought me back with that comment. Wasn't that during the hot minute when Paramount and CBS dropped blu-ray?
Do you have any Universal hd-dvd's? Some (not all) of those look slightly better than their blu-ray counterparts no thanks to a needless application of DNR.
The truly jaw-dropping moment for me was when I saw a breakdown of the vfx in Zodiac revealing much of the crime scene - including the moving cars - to be entirely cgi.
It's been two whole years since Disney bought Lucasfilm and we still haven't heard a peep regarding the OOT. It's mind-boggling to think that this thread was started nine years ago and we're still waiting.
Yup, but this has been Jackson/Walsh/Boyens/del Toro's glorified fanfic from the beginning, and I'm sure their argument for stuff like Lily's character is "but Tolkien never said Legolas didn't have a girlfriend!"
I don't mind the added stuff in concept, it's the execution that was bad. When they first talked years ago about padding out The Hobbit movie with stuff like the White Council, I was picturing something more along the lines of The Council of Elrond and not a long scene with .... just four people standing/sitting/walking around a table.
Wow, nevermind about 60p, it's sounding now like Cameron is going to shoot Avatar 2/3/4 in the 120p "Showscan Digital" format devised by Trumbull within the last few years. I recall seeing the demo video on youtube. If you take every five frames and blur the first three together while deleting the last two, voila, you've got a 24p version.
Anyway, getting back to The Hobbit, someone once summed up the difference between these movies and the PT pretty well. The Hobbit movies' flaws make you appreciate what worked in LotR even more whereas the PT actively hurts your enjoyment of the OT.
Erik Pancakes said:
Would there be a filter that one could use on the Blu-Ray to make it look more like it was filmed at 24fps instead of 48? Like a subtle motion blur or something?
I thought I remembered hearing that they applied a motion blur to the 24p version. Maybe they did and it looked even choppier beforehand, but if that's the case it still looks choppier than it should to me.
Cameron wants to shoot the Avatar sequels at 60p, which makes me wonder just how the hell they'll make a 24p version since you can't evenly extract 24 from 60. He did say that he might just go with 48, though.
With that first Hobbit movie, I remember the first few minutes being very jarring in the theater at 48p. The opening logos looked like a video game! Bilbo walking around his house looked sped-up! I'll reiterate: even in the 24-frame version, the altered shutter speed makes everything look choppy and unnatural.
The tradeoff, however, was that the first wide shot of the inside of Erebor literally took my breath away in 48p. Like, I gasped and teared up. This is what Doug Trumbull was talking about with his Showscan experiments.
I should also say, and maybe it's just me, but the 48p digital Imax presentations of the first two Hobbit movies have probably been the brightest 3D presentations I've seen so far. I don't know if the increased framerate has something to do with that, but there it is.
Didn't George himself basically admit he only had one movie's worth of material for the entire PT and that he saved most of it for Episode III?
Anyway, I actually kind of see the argument for making The Hobbit into three films. PJ had the disadvantage of having already made LotR. He'd wanted to make The Hobbit first but the film rights weren't available at the time. So now The Hobbit is following the massive success of LotR instead of preceding it, so it now needs to "live up" to the originals.
To me, the big difference going into The Hobbit movies was knowing that many of the same people behind the cameras were back. Obviously it was PJ directing again, but it was also Andrew Lesnie shooting. The fact they were using RED Epics (they had to use digital cameras to shoot in 3D) was a worthy tradeoff to me, since LotR was shot in Super 35 and the Epic's sensor is only slightly bigger. Unlike AotC and RotS, the look of these digital prequels would be very close to their film-based counterparts. Native 3D seemed like a natural choice for something like The Hobbit anyway
When they announced (the week after they started shooting, lol) that this (these) would be the first 3D movie(s) to be shot at 48p, something Cameron had wanted to do for the first Avatar, I was enthusiastic. I'd actually assumed that all 3D showings would be the 48-frame version, until I found out the projectors required expensive firmware upgrades and they'd be differentiating the higher framerate version - and only at select locations - with the moniker "hfr."
When I saw that very first teaser trailer, there was something I couldn't quite put my finger on. It looked "kind of" the same and yet different at the same time. They seemed to be using more wide-angle shots, perhaps to show off the 3D, sure, but there was something else...
When the first movie came out, I saw the 48-frame version in Imax 3D and was, overall, blown away by it. The stuff they added definitely slowed the movie down, but the prologue floored me and the movie looked gorgeous.
But here's the tradeoff.
In order to shoot in 48p they had to raise the shutter speed slightly, so that each individual frame was sharper. This makes the 24p version look a little choppy. This is how The Hobbit trilogy will always be "stuck" in the same way AotC and RotS are "stuck."
I think we all knew deep down that Episodes VII-IX would happen someday. George was always gonna go back on that because $$$ just like he's gone back on a lot of other things he's said over the years because $$$. To me it was just like an official OOT restoration. It was gonna happen eventually, it was simply a matter of when.
The real shocker was that it ended up happening so soon (barely a decade after the last movie) and under these circumstances (Lucasfilm getting bought out by Disney). I would've thought that by the time Jedi's 3D version arrived in theaters in 2017 we'd be hearing about an ST coming our way in 2021 or something, probably shot in native 3D since George is crazy about digital and would want to one-up Avatar. My thinking was that the 3D I-VI would be the '97 SE to the ST's PT, if you follow my analogy. The only difference is that George would hire other directors and screenwriters and stick to just writing the story and producing.
By that point the live-action show set between the PT and OT (haha, remember all these things that were gonna happen?!) would've finally gotten off the ground and they could make little connections (think TNG while Star Trek V and VI were coming out, or Enterprise with Nemesis) and start "ramping up" to Episode VII in the 40 years later EU books (no EU reboot, Chewie would still be dead).
When that out-of-the-blue announcement happened almost two years ago (and I'll never forget how I got the news), one of my first thoughts was "they're saving Star Wars from its own creator." GL got his independence from Hollywood back in the day, and that was a good thing ... for a time. Then we got the SE and the PT the GOUT. I'm not saying those same things never could've happened had Star Wars been another Hollywood-owned franchise, but c'mon, they most likely wouldn't have. How many times had I thought "man, if this massive franchise wasn't owned by its creator, we'd have a restored OOT by now."
Sure, it was sad to see George "sell out" to Hollywood, but in many ways he'd sold out long ago. Besides, someone here had an Orson Welles quote in their sig that summed it up pretty well: "The absence of limitations is the enemy of art." It's that tug of war between the studio and the filmmakers that produces something neither would've gotten on their own. That's Star Wars, that's Empire Strikes Back and, hopefully, that'll be Episode VII.
My own explanation for why Lucas changed it is that Shaw as Anakin's ghost was supposed to be representative of "the good man" Luke's father was before becoming Darth Vader.