Just as the Blu-ray industry touted the extraordinary sales success of Blu-ray in 2010 at CES here in Las Vegas on Thursday (Jan. 6), Storm Troopers and Darth Vader took the Panasonic booth stage with Fox Home Entertainment president Mike Dunn to announce that all six films in the Star Wars Saga would finally be coming to HiDef for the first time via Blu-ray in September, prior to the introduction of the Star Wars series in theaters in 3D beginning in 2012.
About 24-hours later directors Oliver Stone, Michael Mann, and Baz Luhrmann sat on the same Panasonic stage and hailed Blu-ray as the last best format for showcasing their movies, each of which has a new one on Blu-ray from Fox.
<Story continues below following two videos, the first a 3 1/2-minute video highlight of all three events… >
<Story continues below the following 2 1/2-minute video interview about the Star Wars release with Fox Home Entertainment exec vp and general manager Simon Swart.>
Stone said Blu-ray is “a dream… even better than having a film print… like having a movie theater in your own home.” With everything going digital, Stone said Blu-ray will be the last physical format for movies, so we should all start collecting as many as we can.
Luhrmann said he also loves Blu-ray and the bonus features that provide so much insight, but that it also creates artistic challenges for restoring older films because it is so vivid and brings out elements never noticed before.
Mann said Blu-ray is the premier showcase for the color and depth nuances that he and other filmmakers spend so much time creating. It does a better job by a factor of 12 or 13, he said. Mann embraces new technologies and said he would like to shoot a dramatic dialogue-driven movie in 3D.
Fans can pre-order the Star Wars Blu-ray sets now, choosing either “The Complete Saga” 9-disc set with all six films and three discs of bonus features for $139.99, or either three-disc trilogy (original or prequel) for $69.99 each.
The more than 30-hours of extras will include previously unseen deleted and alternate scenes.
Also on Thursday, industry org DEG presented the Year-End 2010 Home Entertainment Report, noting that the adoption rate of Blu-ray hardware has increased dramatically over the last two years, including a soaring 62% gain last year, resulting in a U.S. installed base of 28.5 million.
While overall home video spending declined again by 3.3% to $18.8 billion, off a peak of $21.8 billion in 2004, Blu-ray software sales were up 68% to $1.8 billion and rental was up 34%.
Among the other sales highlights in 2010:
* Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment sold 15.3 million copies of “Avatar” in North America, with 5 mil. of those on Blu-ray, making it the #1 Blu-ray title of all time.
* A number of titles saw initial sales on Blu-ray in excess of 30% of total sales including Universal’s “Despicable Me,” Lionsgate’s “The Expendables,” Paramount’s “Iron Man 2,” Sony’s “Salt,” Warner’s “The Town,” and Disney’s “A Christmas Carol.”
* Blu-ray Disc catalog sales are up 52% year over year.
* Six million Blu-ray devices sold in fourth quarter alone.
With Blu-ray 3D launching in 2010, the DEG estimates that 100 Blu-ray 3D titles will be at retail by the end of 2011, in addition to dozens of 3D video games and hundreds of hours of 3D sports.
The DEG estimates that more than 91 million HDTV sets have sold to consumers bringing the number of HDTV households to nearly 56 million. The DEG further estimates that nearly 39% of these households have more than one set.
According to figures compiled by Swicker & Associates on behalf of the DEG, in calendar 2010, more than 170 million Blu-ray Discs shipped to market. In the fourth quarter, some 73 million discs shipped to retail. Since launch, nearly 350 million Blu-ray Discs have shipped.
— By Scott Hettrick