There’s no word yet on mastering or aspect ratio, but our guess (based on international HD broadcasts) is that the title will be formatted for 1.78:1 displays with live action footage scanned from film in full HD and the VFX (which was finished at SD resolution) upsampled. This, if not ideal, would still be a significant improvement upon the DVD release. So fingers crossed the title is coming and we’ll post here when we know more.
Now then... our friends over at Media Play News have just announced the winners of their 2019 Home Media Awards, for which I was once again privileged to serve as an industry judge. Warner’s Batman: The Animated Series took Title of the Year and TV on Disc of the Year honors, while their 4K release of 2001: A Space Odyssey took Blu-ray Disc of the Year and Best Restoration. Also, Disney and Marvel’s Avengers: Infinity War took Best Theatrical Disc, Disney and Lucasfilm’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi took Best Extras/Bonus Material, and Paramount’s Mission: Impossible – Fallout took Best 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray. To see the complete list of winners, be sure to visit this link at Media Play News.
For those of you who are fans of The Criterion Channel today, they’ve just added a new feature to their desktop site, which is a searchable list of all 1,546 films they currently have available for streaming viewing on the service. You can find that here.
Finally today, as many of you probably read on Friday, physical media sales have dropped 50% in the last five years. That’s not a small decline and it makes more necessary something we’re going to have to do a little more often around here accordingly. The Digital Bits generates revenue to keep going in three ways: Advertising (which we know many of you find irritating), Amazon affiliate sales (when you shop for things through our Amazon links), and direct reader donations through our Back the Bits program. Obviously, advertising revenue has declined all across the Internet due to the rise of social media, and Amazon affiliate sales are down as well due to the reasons revealed in the MPAA report on Friday. So if The Bits is going to keep on keeping on, we need to ask you, our readers, to pitch in if you’re able. Whenever you buy literally anything on Amazon.com, please consider going through one of our links first (like this one) – it make a BIG difference for us. And please consider making a recurring donation to our Back the Bits effort via PayPal. It helps us to maintain and pay for our servers and bandwidth, keep our review equipment in good order, and cover our monthly expenses. So we really do appreciate it.
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And let me just say thank you to all our supporters and readers. Whether you’re new to The Bits or a longtime reader, and especially to all those of you who already support us via Back The Bits. We really appreciate each and every one of you. You guys are the best and we’re going to do everything we can to keep on keeping on as long as you want us to.
All right, back tomorrow with more. Stay tuned!
(You can follow Bill on social media at these links: Twitter and Facebook)