Thank the good lord for Comic-Con! It’s the one event every year where you’re guaranteed to run into directors, producers and studio reps (along with a myriad of questionable costumed miscreants) capable of answering your burning home video questions. And this year, Examiner.com‘s Bryan Young hunted down and interrogated Steve Sansweet, the head of Fan Relations at Lucasfilm. Like us, Bryan wanted to know about the possibility of seeing the Star Wars Saga on Blu-ray. And after being softened up by the business end of an electro-pike, Sansweet was ready to offer up the goods…
- “But we’ve been looking at an ultimate box set of the Star Wars movies, all six of the movies. And what special features would be. And clearly these days, if you did an ultimate box set and didn’t do it in HD, Blu-ray, it just wouldn’t make any sense. So now it’s a matter of thinking okay, we’ve been thinking about this for a while, we know what kind of assets we want to use, we’ve done some work in cleaning up things, it’s really a matter of making that decision of when’s the best time to release it.
Do you wait and have an event because you’re working off of the fact that there’s going to be a new live action TV series?
All those things are very much in motion. I can say with pretty good confidence that at some point in the next several years there will be a complete set of Star Wars movies and lots of extras and deleted footage and anything anyone could want. Although I say that with some trepidation now because our fans want everything, “Why the Holiday Special wasn’t on there, you ruined my life!”
But in the next few years there will be an ultimate box set and certainly a Blu-ray set.”
Can’t get any more plain than that. “…there WILL be an ultimate box set and certainly a Blu-ray set.” So, it’s really just timing at this point, as I suspected (and wrote about in a previous article, which you can read here). Expect to see the six-film, Ultimate Star Wars Saga Blu-ray box hitting around the air-date of the upcoming live-action television show.
There’s more information and a lot more Sansweet interview over at Examiner.com.
So it maybe 2 years or less? if the blu-rays are coming around the time of the tv show I for one hope that show air’s sooner than later.
it’s cool to know the saga has been “Green Lighted” 4 Blu-Ray Hi-Def. l hope the films get an even better transfer to 1080p than the DVD’s! or those Sub-Par 1080i TV Versions.
I hope that Lucas puts ego aside and chooses to listen to his fans for once. MANY of us – love the trilogies – but prefer to see them as we originally did – without the special features, new creatures, and minor tweaks he”s made to them over the years. I want the option to watch it the way he originally released it, and his current version. Why now release both in the same set and treat the fans properly. And this time – don’t give us a substandard transfer/audio on the classic version.
I hate that he decided to treat fans of the original films with such disdain last time out.
[...] “There WILL be an ultimate box set and certainly a Blu-ray set” of all six “Star Wars” movies sometime in the next few years says Lucasfilm head of fan relations Steve Sansweet. He adds “we’ve been thinking about this for a while, we know what kind of assets we want to use, we’ve done some work in cleaning up things, it’s really a matter of making that decision of when’s the best time to release it”…” (full details) [...]
Please, stop the crybaby whining. You people act like these movies are yours and its your sister that’s been molested. Don’t like ‘em, don’t watch ‘em.
I want them all, I’m a Star Wars fan till the day i die.
well said compadre, may the force with you!
Aaaarg! *thinking* about it… Waiting for market penetration… Maybe in a couple more years we’ll get the urge to do something about it…
For Pete’s sake get the blu-rays our there and people will buy them. What the frack are you waiting for?!?!!
i cant wait till the trilogys come out on blu ray it will be epic!
They are now available on Green-Ray retro-play media devices, as of Feb 30, 2202. at the national museum of space fiction, New San Francesco branch, NV.
Too little to late. Anyone who’s a serious SW fan already has the 1080p version on their hard disk.
And it rocks!
The new Blu-Ray\HD versions will once again contain re-worked materials and edited scenes so will be slightly different to the dodgy copies available via HDTV transfers.
Scenes which are already confirmed to have been completed are those of the ‘puppet’ Yoda from the Phantom Menace whereby Yoda has become fully CGI to the quality he was seen in Revenge of the Sith.
Work was part completed on many of these re-worked sequences and used in the videos shown as the backdrop to the recent Star Wars Saga symphonic events which have taken place internationally.
New sequences where worked into the video as soon as they became available and so some will have been viewed already but not neccesarily noticed by the audience.
[...] way to cap off a year long anniversary celebration for the studio, would be to finally deliver that Ultimate Star Wars Blu-ray box into the ravenous clutches of desperate [...]
What a toss!!!! Anyone who has been collecting the Star Wars movies from VHS, laserdisc, DVD and now waiting for BluRay knows that we NEVER get anything / everything we want. The Laserdisc box set was a joke, nothing was cleaned up and if you rushed to be the first you missed part of TESB due to a disc change error, then ofcourse the Japanese version comes out and they have extra – estras, those little docos that were originally on TV! Fans want the original theatrical versions of Star Wars, Empire and Jedi, cleaned with great sound. Lucas and co. always talk about technology but they don’t deliver when it comes to home video, there is always more form them to take a trip to the well!
[...] I’m not exactly sure how many times it needs to be confirmed but George Lucas just re-iterated on stage at the Celebration V convention that he’s going to unleash the Star Wars saga on Blu-ray disc. This time, however, we’ve got a rough release window to look forward to – the discs will hit shops next year, in 2011. And they will include never-before-seen deleted scenes!! [...]