Re: Star Wars Originals - Time to call out George Lucas or embrace the Special Editio
They'd be crazy not to. There's a bit of money in it, and boatloads of fan goodwill.
Well, yes and no.
The money issue is, as I understand it, fairly complex and relates to things like future-proofing the films.
Right now, it's doubtful whether a 1080p blu-ray release of the OOT would be worth the cost for restoring it. Fan goodwill is irrelevant, since we all know that the fans of this franchise are, at least in the aggregate, junkies who'll gobble up whatever you slap the logo on. Or at least, that's what the suits think, and they're mostly right.
The main economic benefit (from my understanding of the situation, that is) is in future releases. All of the Star Wars material right now is
mastered at 1080p. That means further resolution increases will be artificial ones like the upscaling a blu-ray player does when it pops in a DVD. Looks good, but not as "real" or "natural" as when you have a source that's natively higher resolution.
Depending on what the next widely adopted generation of consumer home video is, you could be looking at a significant increase in resolutions. The bump up to 2K probably isn't enough to warrant another pass, but a 4K or 8K release might be, given the drastic increase in resolution that you'd see. Upscaling a 1080p source just won't cut it for such releases, so it'd make sense to go back to the film originals, restore them, and rescan them at 8K.
BUT the flipside to this argument is that 2-dimensional television is (arguably) hitting a point of diminishing returns where increased resolution is kind of pointless. The screen sizes for consumer electronics just aren't big enough to warrant a 4K or 8K display. You might be able to run a clever marketing scheme to tell people they need to get the ultra-razzle-dazzle 4K/8K display...but the leading edge of that change, the videophiles, won't buy it unless it's like a +100" display (and even then, you'd probably only need to go to 2K). Plus, streaming is becoming far more popular and economically attractive to content owners, but the national infrastructure isn't really set up to handle the kinds of bandwidths required to stream 4K/8K to homes around the nation.
So, on the one hand, yeah, it'd make sense to update the masters if you can make a buck long-term off of it. But on the other, the kind of buck you'd be making is more likely to be a theatrical re-release of the OOT, rather than a home release (or a theatrical, followed by a home release). Otherwise, it's a bit more of a niche market.
My hope is that they'll restore them anyway and put them out in some ginormous mega-set to entice the oldsters to buy after the new trilogy is done...but be prepared for these films to languish for a long time.
