Meanwhile, our friends over at StudioCanal in the UK have announced a great new 4K Ultra HD collector’s edition of Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone (2001) that’s coming there on 4/13. The film has been the subject of a new 4K restoration. Extras will include a new introduction by the director, THREE separate audio commentaries with the director (one by Sony in 2004, one by Optimum in 2011, and another with del Toro joined by cinematographer Guillermo Navarro), a video prologue, a behind-the-scenes piece, Of Ghosts and Fauns: Del Toro’s Spanish Civil War, the Original EPK Featurette, “Que es un Fantasma?” The Making of The Devil’s Backbone, deleted scenes with optional commentary, a multi-angle feature, a Special Effects featurette, the Director’s Notebook, an image gallery, and the film’s theatrical trailer. The packaging will also include a 64-page booklet and a pair of posters.

Kino Lorber Studio Classics has set Howard Zieff’s House Calls (1978) for Blu-ray release on 4/21. They’ve also delayed their planned 4K Ultra HD release of Jeannot Szwarc’s Somewhere in Time (1980) from 2/10 to 2/24. Adjust your plans accordingly.

And Eureka Entertainment has set a new box set—Adventure Calls! Karl May at CCC—for Blu-ray release on 4/28. It includes 7 films produced by Arthr Brauner, all starring Lex Barker, including Hugo Fregonese’s Old Shatterhand (1964), Harald Reinl’s Winnetou and Shatterhand in the Valley of Death (1968), Robert Siodmak’s The Shoot (1964), The Treasure of the Aztecs (1965), and The Pyramid of the Sun God (1965), and Franz Josef Gottlieb’s Through Wild Kurdistan (1965) and In the Kingdom of the Silver Lion (1965). All are mastered from new 4K scans of the original camera negatives, and feature the original German audio with English subtitles. The package also includes extensive extras and a 60-page collector’s book. The set is limited to 2K copes.

In other news today, Scharon Harding at ars technica posted a good article on Friday to the effect that The TV Industry Finally Concedes That the Future May Not Be in 8K.

LOL. Ya think?

Seriously though, TV manufacturers are always looking for the next big thing. But in the same way we haven’t really moved past the smartphone form factor for a decade (despite all the talk of wearables and foldables), flat panel TVs have reached peak consumer utility—they’re fast, offer excellent 4K quality, are available in the perfect sizes, etcetera. Nobody really needs more than 4K resolution outside of serious industrial professionals (folks at NASA for example, along with medical and satellite imaging, film remastering, et cetera). I know for a fact that some TV makers really wanted to push toward 4K autostereoscopic 3-D (as well as 8K), but that requires a LOT more cheap processing power per display. And most of the world’s available chip production is now being directed towards AI. So the reality is, consumer displays have simply hit a technological plateau that we’re going to have to live with for at least a decade or two. And you know what? I think that’s just fine.

Finally this afternoon, a number of subscribers to our Digital Bits Patreon page have been asking us why the major Hollywood studios seem to be struggling with releasing 4K titles on 100 GB discs—and struggling to keep them in stock—while the boutique labels don’t seem to be having much trouble at all.

And the answer is fairly straightforward: While the major studios may release 10-20 4K titles per year (including both new release films and catalog), some of the boutique labels release easily 2-3 times that number of titles. And while the major studios tend to replicate larger batch runs per title, many of the boutiques replicate in batches of 2-5K. So essentially, the replicators do a lot more business with the boutiques and thus give them better deals. They tend to keep the replication schedules full. And remember: Only a few years ago, many of the major studios stepped back from 4K disc production as they pivoted to streaming. It was only when streaming failed to be a profit center—and when COVID crushed the theatrical business—that studios like Disney pivoted back. It makes sense then that the replicators tend to give their best customers their best service. Just saying.

All right, that’s all for today.

Back more soon. Stay tuned!

- Bill Hunt

(You can follow Bill on social media on Twitter, BlueSky, and Facebook, and also here on Patreon)