In deference to the upcoming 40th annual Earth Day celebration on 4/24/10, Fox Home Entertainment has designated a rare Thursday release for the highest-grossing film of all time, James Cameron's Avatar. Oscar-winning producer Jon Landau made an appearance in New York to discuss the Avatar Blu-ray with select members of the press, and Big Picture Big Sound was in attendance.
Interestingly, the announced first version of the Blu-ray Disc will contain no extras whatsoever, even the menus will be scaled back from what we're used to in the Blu-ray format. Landau explained the reasoning behind releasing this edition at this time, hinting at more elaborate options to come.
"With the added content that we wanted to do, in today's day and age, the internet has made behind-the-scenes footage available prior to a DVD release, so you can't just put that on there, because people have seen that already. You have to create original content to support the added-value material. So we needed the time to create the appropriate added-value content, including scenes that weren't in the movie that Weta Digital is now taking four to five months to finish, to be in the movie. And we just couldn't wait for a DVD release, until November, and we couldn't get that content ready before that. So we chose to say, 'Let's get rid of all the frills. Let's get rid of trailers, let's get rid of commercials, let's get rid of director's commentary and utilize every available bit of disc space for the presentation of the film itself."
Even the menus?
"We wanted very simplistic menus, again because things I didn't know about before we sort of had this mandate, I'd say, Can we elaborate on the menu a little bit?' They said, 'We could, but you have to do nine different versions, and you gotta do it in French, you gotta do it in Spanish, and you've gotta do all this different branching and it's going to take up this space, so you're going to lose something off of the picture quality. And we just didn't want to do that."
But with 3D video hardware beginning to arrive in consumers' homes, and with an estimated 60% of Avatar's theatrical audience having experienced the movie in 3D, why no 3D Blu-ray?
"I think ultimately, there definitely will be. I think right now it's too premature. We would be the egg coming before the chicken." (laughs) "And we've worked with a lot of the manufacturers to assure that there's going to be a high quality of 3D out there in the marketplace, because the last thing that you want to do is go out on some of these screens you've seen in the past where the quality just isn't there. We just have to evaluate how the consumers are embracing that over the next months, and what format really takes hold. We spent a lot of time on this initial release going back in, color timing. Jim spent a week with the color timer who did it for the movie, where he went and didn't have one monitor in front of him, he had an array of monitors that represented what is in the home marketplace today to make sure that the colors and that world were representative of what the movie was.When we did our encoding down to the disc, we didn't spend the normal two weeks, we spent five weeks and had people from Lightstorm going and monitoring what was going to be there. We want to be able to do the same thing and have the time to do it when we see which one has the best hold in the marketplace. I would love for it to be December!"
Additionally, a special new home entertainment mix was created by the original movie crew, working at Skywalker Sound. Purchasers of this "initial release" will be able to sign up online and receive previews of bonus content from the upcoming four-disc special edition (still not in 3D), for which a two-hour "making of" program will be one of many special features.
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