Also, earlier this week we mentioned a number of Best Buy-exclusive Universal catalog Blu-ray titles coming in August (The Babe (1992), BASEketball, Bowfinger, EdTV, For the Love of the Game, and Problem Child, all on 8/8). Well, Amazon is also going to have a slate of exclusives on Blu-ray from the studio in September, including The Skulls, The Paper, Fletch Lives, Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, and For Richer or Poorer. Street date is TBA.
Kino Lorber has announced the DVD release of Will Sheff’s Down Down the Deep River on 9/5. Kino has also announced that Edwin Sherin’s Valdez is Coming (1971) is coming soon to Blu-ray as part of their Studio Classics line.
Lionsgate has announced the Blu-ray, DVD, and Digital HD of Sean Penn’s The Last Face on 9/5. The film stars Charlize Theron and Javier Bardem.
Speaking of Charlize Theron, pre-orders are now open on Amazon for Atomic Blonde on Blu-ray, DVD, and 4K Ultra HD from Universal. Street date is TBA. Pre-orders are also open for The Dark Tower on Blu-ray, DVD, and 4K Ultra HD Sony. Click on the title links for the 4K pre-order pages (you can find BD and DVD from there).
In other news today, Disney has announced that they’re pulling all of their digital content off of Netflix to start their own streaming service. You can read more about that here and here at Variety. It’s an interesting move, and probably not surprising, but one can’t help imaging a day when literally every single TV series or film you’d like to see will require you to subscribe to a different digital service. I’m not sure consumers are going to like being nickel and dimed that much. We’ll see.
Meanwhile, a number of you have asked whether Disney’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 on 4K Ultra HD will come with a 4K/Dolby Vision digital code. And answer is, we don’t think so (but we’ll confirm when we have the disc in hand). Right now, the film is available via streaming in 4K with Dolby Vision from Vudu only, but we believe the Disney Movies Anywhere system doesn’t yet recognize 4K. That will come in the future. So we believe that the code you get with the 4K disc will be for HD only, at least for now. It remains to be seen whether Disney will (and will be able to) retroactively grant you 4K access at a future date, once their system is ready for it.
Stay tuned...
- Bill Hunt
(You can follow Bill on social media at these links: Twitter and Facebook)