That has always been my thinking on this topic when it first came up post Disney acquisition, Dan. Although vocal and here in the RPF, I have always felt there is a limited market for this content.
I honestly can't say one way or the other about the market. Is the market only the hardcore "Screw the SEs, I want the OOT" fans? Or is the market both the fans of the SEs and the fans of only the OOT? I'd figure that SE fans would be happy to get these, too, if not necessarily holding out for them like the OOT fans. And then there's the market that buys anything with the Star Wars logo on it.
This is why I just can't tell WHAT "the market" really is here. I'd agree that hardcore "Screw the SEs" fans are a smaller portion of Star Wars fandom than they may think. But I'm not sure that the market for such a release is limited to them.
Even if it was, though, that raises the question of price point. Could you anticipate the size of that limited market and offset its smaller size by increasing the cost of the discs? Or would the market refuse to bear that price, even being hardcore fans? That's also something I can't tell. For all the fans out there who say "Man, I'd pay $200 JUST for the OOT if it was properly restored!" you have to wonder how many would turn around and pillory Disney for "greedily gouging the most loyal fans!!" or somesuch.
I wouldn't think the basis for deciding would be soley the market for the OT unaltered at 1080p (not sure what 1024 is unless it's someting industry specific to the 2.35 ration).
That was me still coming off a weekend where I got about 3 hours sleep on Saturday night.
I'll edit to revise, but yeah, I meant 1080p. I think I got 1024 in my head from old computer screen resolutions. Go figure...
As noted, there are NO masters at all for the movies any higher than 1080p. In order to do 2, 4 or 8K, you'd have to rescan from scratch, no? Seems to me the two of those could be combined to rescan the original at a much higher res and in turn use that to do an unaltered release.
But I tend to agree with the idea that the market for these isn't as huge as some think. But it is something you could do to justify a new master and then kick out a product to help offset - or pay for - that cost.
Right, that's been the counter-argument about "The market's too small." You could use rescans as the basis for 2/4/8K SE releases, too, although you'd need to update the edited scenes.
Of course, that calls into question things like the upper end of resolutions for displays. Some have argued that display size would make home video 4/8K displays impractical both from a size and power consumption standpoint. I think what we'd be more likely to see isn't display size, but rather resolution improvements within existing display sizes, kinda like Apple's Retina display. Instead of increasing the size of the display device, you shrink the size of the pixels. (Or so I understand it, anyway -- I'm probably not describing that accurately.)
It's tough to say, really, but I think it's worth considering the practical side of all of this, rather than just the film preservation side or from a perspective of blind fandom.