Not true, according to for example Mike Verta and several others.
A reasonable facsimile of the OOT could be cobbled together from existing sources for home release regardless of the supposed non existence of certain original elements. If fans can do it on their PC, a multibillion dollar company can certainly swing it. And should.
I won't touch on the "should" for fear of invoking the wrath of
Bryancd, but yes, it is possible to do. I think the truth depends on one's point of view. Lucasfilm has said they don't have the original negatives, but from what I remember, there are other sources that are basically just as good which do exist, and which almost certainly were referenced by Lowry Digital for the 2004 DVD release. There may even be a 2K or 4K scan of the film in its non-SE version.
The "can they" isn't the issue. The issue is "will they" and the only answer to that depends on the cost involved and the market for the material.
I'll get back to this in a bit.
This.
Multiple fan-edits are becoming more popular than the official stuff. That speaks volumes.
Lucasfilm says the original negative cannot be pieced back together? Whatever. This is the same company that still has individual elements from optically-composited shots they did when Gerald Ford was president.
Even if that was true ... the Blu-Ray's color timing alone is bad enough to justify using a 2nd-generation print to fix it.
And before that, fans were already griping that the SE CGI work alone was bad enough to justify using a 2nd-generation print to undo that.
No other movie has such a crazy situation with so much fanbase and yet such crappy versions for sale. Nothing else comes close.
Except these fan-edits use the same crappy blu-rays as a source.
And fix the color timing...
This is accurate. Fan edits tend to play with the color timing, too. But I really can't think of any other film of this kind that has gone through edits of this kind, which so irritate a portion of the fanbase. Probably because any edits to other films are put out alongside the original versions (or some cleaned up original version), whereas Lucas' dictate from when he ran the show was "Those versions are no longer to be sold."
So, here's the bottom line. Disney could make this happen. Disney could make this happen
easily. They haven't, though, because they don't think there's a
profitable market out there. How do I know they don't think there's a profitable market?
Because they haven't done it yet. Disney isn't going to leave money on the table. They aren't stupid, and neither are the people running LFL. These folks know how to make money and how to take care of their IP. Arguably they're some of the best in the business at that kind of thing, treating the works they own with a degree of care that many other film studios don't bother with.
So, if Disney hasn't done so, you have to ask yourself why. The simple answer is "There aren't
enough people clamoring for the original version to make it worthwhile." This might suggest that there will never be a market for such a move. Not so, in my opinion. And, actually, from my perspective at least, George Lucas' surprising shortsightedness in terms of media longevity is the culprit.
The DVD transfers are, if memory serves, based off of 2K scans that Lowry Digital took to make them back in 2004. Those 2K scans still serve as "masters" for the blu-rays, so the source material is, at best, 2K. The Special Edition material, though, was done
natively at 1080p. Meaning that the 2K scans were all converted down to 1080p, at which point Lucasfilm's in-house folks began adding stuff, all at 1080p. Because this stuff is digital, rather than based on analog sources, there is literally no way to wring more resolution out of the picture, short of using some kind of interpolating software that "guesses" at what would occupy the pixels "in between" what's on the screen, were you to blow it up. (This is also why the goofy "enhance...enhance" bit on various CSI shows is so stupid.)
Meanwhile, consumer home theater products have been humming along nicely for several years. It looks as though consumer displays are basically skipping past the 2K point, and going to 4K (with 8K as a distant/expensive-but-possible format as well). The thing is, displays don't really matter, if there's no content for them to display. If everyone is still using blu-rays at 1080p, then there's no reason to upgrade, because why buy a TV that can't show anything better than 1080p if you don't watch anything better than 1080p? Enter the streaming services. As disc-based media is gradually dying off, streaming services are on the rise. And the services are now starting to use "UltraHD" -- 4K streams -- as a marketing point. This means that now you actually have quite a bit to watch on your 4K display!
Into this mix, we throw the Star Wars films. Now, the prequels were all shot at 1080p, so they're never gonna get any better looking, again, short of interpolation software. But the OT? That you could actually get more visual clarity from. This, in turn, could prompt Disney/LFL to rescan the source material for transfer to 4K home resolution (either with a 4K disc or 4K stream, or both). This would also necessitate revisiting the various CGI elements added as part of the SE...but it would ALSO mean that someone, somewhere, has scanned in a 4K (actually, probably higher if they're smart) version of the OOT -- without SE elements.
At that point, it becomes a lot more feasible to release the OOT to the market...because you'll basically have to recreate the OOT to recreate the SEs. So...might as well sell it as part of some $200 mega-set of films, like a 9- or 12-disc boxed set, or some package deal for downloading. And let's be honest here: who among us wouldn't HAPPILY pay that amount just to get a copy of the OOT? I know I sure would! I suspect Disney knows this market exists, but it just isn't big enough to warrant spending the money
now to release a version
now that will be obsolete the instant it hits the streets. It makes more sense to future-proof, scan the OOT in at 8K, keep a copy at 4K for distribution, and then use another copy as the basis for your redone SE, and release it all in a few years.
Oh, by the way, that gets us to the next big hurdle: the licensing deals.
20th Century Fox owns Star Wars (1977). It holds a license to distribute on the remaining films, I think, until...actually this year, maybe. Might be 2020. I can't remember. But it's a license that can revert to Disney/LFL, and likely will. NOTHING will be done before those licensing deals end, because why the hell would Disney/LFL want to spend money to rescan a film...only to be forced to split profits with Fox? Screw that! They'd rather keep their money, or at least as much of it as possible, and they don't have to lift a finger to get back 5/6 of the original films. After that point, it's just another licensing deal so that Disney can either buy out the license for ANH, or ensure that Fox gets its cut.
So, bottom line, this CAN happen, but almost certainly WON'T happen until several years from now. But after that point, I think it's possible, even likely, that we'll see the OOT available again for home release, and probably in some "archival" format.