Director James Cameron says many aspects of the Blu-ray version of “Avatar,” being released April 22 by Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, are as good or better than the theatrical versions.
“Thank God for Blu-ray,” he said following the screening of a clip from the movie on Blu-ray Disc to selected members of the media for a presentation Tuesday, March 23, in a mansion in the hills above West Hollywood.
(Story continues following the 3 1/2-minute video below of Cameron’s presentation.)
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While noting that the home experience cannot match the theater environment, which is more immersive and more fully fills the viewers field of vision, Cameron and producer Jon Landau spent an hour explaining how and why they took pains to create a Blu-ray edition that matches the high level of quality of the best digital and IMAX theatrical presentations of the film. Cameron said he prefers the 16×9 aspect ratio of Blu-ray and digital theatrical presentations over the 2.35:1 Cinemascope size of the 35mm film prints, and that the Blu-ray also includes more of the vertical height of the IMAX presentation to accentuate scenes like the flying creatures as they plummet down the side of a mountain.
Cameron and Landau also said that all that quality is, in part, what dictated the decision to release the movie on disc without a single bonus feature — not so much as a trailer — so as not to compromise a single bit of available disc space. Their logic is that with such a long movie that barely fits on the disc, adding anything else would require reducing the bit-rate for the movie. Besides, Cameron says he can’t stand watching “crap trailers.” Somehow none of those concerns about space and quality or their objections to “extraneous” content will prevent them from releasing the movie again only seven months later in November as a presumably more expensive Blu-ray “Ultimate Edition,” as noted by Landau, with lots of bonus features. And then there is an eventual 3D edition that one would assume would require significant more disc space, if not twice as much, to allow for the second hi-def 3D angle in the movie itself. But neither gentleman mentioned anything to do with 3D on Blu-ray.
The subject of 3D did come up twice, however, the first time when Cameron described another advantage for Blu-ray over theatrical presentations. He said that because 3D theater projectors have a polarized filter that reduce the light level by half, and then viewing the movie through the required polarized 3D glasses reduces the light by another 50%, the brighter “dynamics” of TVs restore the original brightness to the film. He didn’t say how the 2D Blu-ray compares to the 2D theatrical versions of the movie.
Most encouraging for the Blu-ray format, Cameron said pre-sales of “Avatar” indicate that consumers are favoring the more expensive Blu-ray version over standard-def DVD, just as most moviegoers chose to pay a premium price to see the film in 3D instead of 2D, and at Imax 3D theaters instead of traditional 3D theaters.
If this trend holds for Blu-ray, Cameron believes “Avatar” could help drive even stronger consumer conversion from DVD to Blu-ray.
— By Scott Hettrick