[Oliver Klohs]

Hi,


I am still HD-DVD only and the main reason why is that there seem to be no older movies available from the BR exclusive studios.


Fox, MGM, Disney and Sony have a large library of big classic movies and I would have hoped for one or two big titles to have made it by now, so far all studios but Warner and Universal are a no show in this regard.


So are there some big titles coming the first half of the year ?


Oliver

 

[eightninesuited]

Well, Lawrence of Arabia is pretty much guaranteed to be out after Q1.

 

[camaj]

Look at it this way, all the "old" films on HD DVD are on Blu-ray so you're not loosing anything. But there are quite a few exclusives coming out this year:


A Bridge too far

Battle of Britain

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kid

The Graduate

A fistful of dollars


Not to mention Rocky which is already out nor some of the early-80's films which aren't that much newer than the pre-80's stuff


Bridge over the River Kwai should also be out this year, although it hasn't been rescheduled

 

[MrHunt]

The main ones I want are For A Few Dollars More, Once Upon a Time in the West, and Death Wish 1 and 2... those movies would complete my life.

 

[Dammenion]

Nearly all studios promised 5-10 catalog titles a month. I'm sure that will ramp up once the install base is larger. With the HD disk market still small they can't release too much too soon or they will canabilize their own sales. So classics will come. Probably just getting release dates as announcements.

 

[SirDrexl]

Most of the older titles coming to BD are from MGM. Kudos to them for choosing some older titles.

 

[Oliver Klohs]



Quote:
Originally Posted by camaj /forum/post/0


Look at it this way, all the "old" films on HD DVD are on Blu-ray so you're not loosing anything. But there are quite a few exclusives coming out this year:


A Bridge too far

Battle of Britain

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kid

The Graduate

A fistful of dollars


Not to mention Rocky which is already out nor some of the early-80's films which aren't that much newer than the pre-80's stuff


Bridge over the River Kwai should also be out this year, although it hasn't been rescheduled

I got the classics from the neutral studios and Universal already, so I am not missing anything even without having a BlueRay playback device

The movies you mention are nice though, although they do not get me as excited as The Searchers, Mutiny on the Bounty, Grand Prix and Spartacus.


Can you be more specific with regard to when the BR exclusive classics will be released ?

I remember the second dollar movie was even announced for last year - oh well...

 

[Oliver Klohs]



Quote:
Originally Posted by eightninesuited /forum/post/0


Well, Lawrence of Arabia is pretty much guaranteed to be out after Q1.

What does that mean ? 1 year after Q1 ?

I would really like to know a more substantial time frame for these, as it seems there were a few releases of older stuff announced before and they were all pushed back so far.


Just kidding, but LOA gets mentioned since the first BR demos of the movie that were quite bad - so a new transfer coming soon would be a very nice surprise.

 

[Gary Murrell]

Once .. West, a man can only dream

Classics didn't arrive on DVD for a while after launch, it takes forever to get to them because sadly people don't care about them nowdays, most people get excited over Vendetta being released on HD-DVD, I get excited over Deer Hunter and Forbidden Planet etc.


LOA was remastered with help by Robert Harris a few years back, it is not needing in that area I can assure you, the superbit DVD was reference


-Gary

 

[TwinTurboZX]



Quote:
Originally Posted by MrHunt /forum/post/0


The main ones I want are For A Few Dollars More, Once Upon a Time in the West, and Death Wish 1 and 2... those movies would complete my life.

Actually I'd need the entire Sergio Leone catalog on BD to complete my life, but in the meantime Fistful of Dollars is a very good start.

 

[camaj]



Quote:
Originally Posted by Oliver Klohs /forum/post/0


Can you be more specific with regard to when the BR exclusive classics will be released ?

The release date list on wikipedia and highdefdigest will give you all the dates but essentially they won't start appearing until late Spring.

 

[Oliver Klohs]



Quote:
Originally Posted by Gary Murrell /forum/post/0


Once .. West, a man can only dream

Classics didn't arrive on DVD for a while after launch, it takes forever to get to them because sadly people don't care about them nowdays, most people get excited over Vendetta being released on HD-DVD, I get excited over Deer Hunter and Forbidden Planet etc.


LOA was remastered with help by Robert Harris a few years back, it is not needing in that area I can assure you, the superbit DVD was reference


-Gary

You are probably right that not too many studios execs care about classics, not sure about the customers though. It would be interesting to see sales numbers for the big movies, like LOA and Ben Hur, I bet they sell enough o make their release profitable, I'll aslo take a guess and say that they are more steady sellers than the latest blockbuster, therefore they are pretty well suited to an early release when a new format is started.


LOA still had a pretty nasty enhanced look on Superbit - I peaked into it and quickly resold it.

So I was not talking about the work that Mr. Harris has done in the celluloid domain but rather about what happened after that - I am pretty sure they have to go back to the drawing board there.


Universal did not do that with Spartacus which also was a title highly regarded on DVD - it came out as the worst of the large format movies released so far (the others are The Searchers, Grand Prix, Mutiny) - a good DVD release does not mean much in the new high def world.

 

[rlsmith]

The titles that are selling and making a difference in the format war are the action films and video-game-comic-book movies. This reflects the demographic of the folks buying into the formats right now.


Warners tried quite a few classics last year, putting quite an effort into quality releases (Searchers and others already mentioned). I gather that they didn't do very well, which is not surprising. I will buy all of them on Blu-ray.


As Universal's experience with Spartacus on HD DVD shows, it is also important to have the highest quality, which means expensive remastering. HD customers of classics are going to be very demanding.


I would emphatically disagree with some of the comments about the motives of studio execs. These folks LOVE the classics. On a personal basis, they generally have excellent taste, and would love to make great movies if they were marketable.

 

[Oliver Klohs]



Quote:
Originally Posted by rlsmith /forum/post/0


I would emphatically disagree with some of the comments about the motives of studio execs. These folks LOVE the classics. On a personal basis, they generally have excellent taste, and would love to make great movies if they were marketable.

Well, were are the numbers that show they aren't marketable ?


The problem is there are no numbers for copies sold for almost all BR and HD-DVDs. Add to that the fact that older movies sell better in the long run compared to initial release sales and it is even questionable what the numbers of copies sold up to now would mean.


I am also very astonished that you know so much about studio execs. Could you please share how many studio execs' movie collections you have personally seen in order to make such a statement ?