Re: Star Wars Episode VII
I think the cnet article raises some important points about screen size and consumer preference.
Who is to say that they'll not do it, to not **** off George? Who's to say that it wasn't in the terms of sale that they never release the OOT?
Why not just release both? Because those who want the OOT are a niche market.
True. But the real question, as I see it, isn't the size of the market, but rather the cost to the manufacturer. I'll get to that in a second, though.
Let me analogize to something outside the entertainment industry. Another forum I post on is The Fedora Lounge, it's a collection of gentlemen who like fedoras (I guess the name is a dead giveaway). Not the newly popular hipster ones (the bane of my existence!), but guys who collect vintage fur felt hats from the late 1800's through until about 1970 when things really started going down hill.
Trilbys and stingy-brims don't count as fedoras, in my opinion. You need at least 2.5", dimensionally cut, depending on the hat and the person wearing it. Take heart, however, in the fact that it seems the ironic trucker hat may be moving towards becoming the hipster chapeau of choice.
Back in the day, hats were sold "open crown" that is, unshaped. You would go to a haberdasher, whom would help you pick out a hat that complimented one's build, and it would be creased to the wearer's preference. 99% of all men's hats sold today are pre-creased, that is, they are molded into their final shape by the actual machinery.
Alongside an overall decrease in quality in modern hats , one of the reasons those guys and myself prefer vintage hats is this ability to shape the hats how we like.
Why don't you just buy from hatsdirect and bash it yourself? That's what I did.
Oh, and if you're ever in Billings, MT, head over to Rand's for some awesome custom hats. They're mostly western stuff, but they'll do a custom job on their European Clay that works terrifically. But I digress.
This is a group of guys who have begged, and tried to work with Stetson, on the manufacture of a new "open crown" hat (consumers and retailers!). They've been rebuffed every time. Stetson actually did release an "open crown" hat a few years ago, but discontinued it because of poor sales (they sold less than 300 over the course of a year). And then every so often, someone new comes on the board and says "look at all of us here, Stetson must not want to sell to us!"
All of which is to say, it's easy to overestimate the demand for something when you really want it. Don't get me wrong, I would love to be proven wrong on this, and I'll be in line with you guys if Disney does ever release an unaltered original trilogy. But I'm not waiting on baited breath, and I certainly don't expect them to do it. Just because there is a market, doesn't mean that it's a market big enough for Disney to care about.
Right, but there's a few things at play with Stetson that don't really apply in the Disney case.
With Stetson, you're talking about a manufacturing process, requiring a fair bit of automated machinery with some human presence at the factory, too. It would probably be more expensive for them to hire people to physically remove a specific selection of unbashed hats. Then there's the question of which hats you're pulling out unbashed. Do you only pull one specific line of hats? In which colors? How much inventory do you set aside to do this? How much of it will go unsold? Plus, the unbashed hats are not merely something that the vast bulk of the market isn't interested in, but are something that they'd actively avoid. PLUS we have no idea what the actual assembly process even is. My bet would be that the automated process has a series of molds using steam and they simply cut and press the hat in stages, then add the liner and sweat band, and cap it off with the ribbon. You might even have to interrupt the actual manufacturing process -- or alter the machine program to skip a step or somesuch -- just to get unbashed hats out of the normal run. Who knows.
With Blu-ray manufacturing, though, it's a different story. Your physical costs for the discs are identical. All you're doing is mass-burning discs, then slapping labels on them and sticking them into a case. Your case and labels are probably your most expensive step, but even that's a low-level thing. The real expense assumed would be in deciding how to handle the initial scan. Would you scan the entire original and clean it up, then go back and add SE effects and scenes? Or would you try to figure out some way to work with the 1080p masters of the SEs and "upscale" the whole thing using some algorithm? Put simply, if they go with the rescan at 4K, and then redo all the f/x and added scenes for the SE content, there's no reason not to simply save an un-specialized version of the file, and then add the SE stuff after.
Once you do that, it's just the matter of dedicating some of your burners to do non-SE burns. Moreover, releasing a version of Star Wars without the special edition stuff would, unlike the unbashed fedora, not mean squat to most consumers. I'd bet they wouldn't even really be able to tell the difference unless they were hardcore fans like us. I mean, think about it. Would you expect people in the fan community to complain if the roles of the OOT and SEs were reversed when we hit higher res home formats? Like, where the SEs are only available in the lower-res (BD) format, and the OOT is now available in the higher res? I kinda doubt people would care that much. I mean, I could be wrong, and I'm admittedly guessing at the process of DVD/BD manufacturing, but it strikes me that the only real additional expense you take on is the packaging. You don't have added process expenses, and it's already been demonstrated that there's a market for the stuff.
There's also the little matter of piracy to consider. When you're talking about hats, pretty much, the only way to get a Stetson hat is to get it from the Stetson corporation. With the OT, there ARE 35mm prints (and other sizes) floating around out there. It's not a stretch to think that the same thing we saw with the LD rips prior to 2006 would happen with a de-specialized high-res edition. And we've already seen how LucasFilm -- even WITH Lucas himself at the helm -- responded to that.
Lastly, let's be honest. George is a consultant, sure, but Disney holds the purse strings now. And George signed over the rights to the films. He created 'em, sure, but he doesn't OWN them anymore. They are no longer "his stories." So, while they could be nice and respect him, I rather doubt they're REQUIRED to do that. Unless there's something in the agreement of sale that acts like an easement would on real property, I can't imagine there's anything other than good intentions to stop Disney from doing whatever it pleases. Put simply, if the only thing holding them back is George's hurt feelings....George better invest in some tissues.
Yes, but a much larger niche market than most and VERY loud. To the point that they released them in 2006 to try and stem the OOT piracy going on. Also, in the past five years large companies have been focusing more and more on niche markets to great financial success.
Exactly. Plus, as I've discussed, there's the issue of "It wouldn't really cost us anything to do it, other than packaging." They could even charge a higher price for a super-special 9-volume, 12-disc version of the series, just to guarantee that those of us who are hardasses about the PT and SEs would buy 'em. And dammit, much as I hate to admit it...I'd buy it! And then lock the PTs and SEs in a vault.
But not so loud or powerful that we got it on bluray.
But again, that was while Lucas was still at the helm and they were "his" stories. They aren't his anymore, so the issue of his ego is potentially much diminished, if not eliminated altogether.
Another boxed set with Episodes 1-9 but no originals, only special editions? Again?!
If 7-9 are worth buying, I'll get just those. A 1-9 boxed set without the OOT would have to contain a real working lightsaber to get me to buy the special editions and prequels again.
That'd assume they'll release them in separate boxes. I wouldn't be so sure that the OOT would be released in a separate box. At the very least, I can see them requiring you to pay extra and buy the SEs, at least on initial release, if not the whole nonology.
Also, I'd rather have a working E-11 or better still a DL-44.
