Paramount Catalog Titles on Blu

[nicolas]

We Were Soldiers (2002) will be released in 4K on November 5.
According to Geoff D on the other forum, this is one of the earliest films that was fully finished on a 2K DI, however they originally scanned the film in 4K.
Here is some info on the post-production: https://forum.blu-ray.com/showpost.php? ... ostcount=4.

[yoloswegmaster]

New from The Digital Bits regarding layoffs from Paramount:

We’ve learned from multiple sources now that the 15% US workforce cuts at Paramount Global—a restructuring that’s happening in advance of the company’s merger with Skydance Media to reduce annual costs by some $500 million—have landed very heavily on the Melrose lot. As reported widely last week, the layoffs amount to about 2,000 people, with most expected to be gone by the end of next month and the rest by year’s end.

Current co-CEOs George Cheeks, Brian Robbins, and Chris McCarthy have described the layoffs thusly in a memo to the workforce: “As we continue to advance our plan, we announced on our earnings call last week that we will be reducing our US-based workforce by approximately 15%, focusing on redundant functions and streamlining corporate teams.”

The expectation was that every division would be impacted. As reported last week, Paramount Television Studios has been shuttered completely. What’s not been reported widely yet is the impact on overall studio operations.

The Digital Bits sources indicate that nearly every department has been affected—in a few cases severely—from marketing, legal, and accounting, to production, post-production, finance, mastering, vault and library services, and unfortunately also Paramount Home Entertainment. The cuts are reportedly not so deep as to result in a complete loss of institutional knowledge, but they’re more than deep enough to result in major workflow disruptions.

Word first began to reach The Bits early last week that indie home entertainment distributors working regularly with Paramount—among them Imprint, Kino Lorber Studio Classics, Vinegar Syndrome, and Shout! Studios—were suddenly facing a complete freeze on new licensing activity.

Within hours of receiving that news, we began sending out inquiries to sources within the industry and the implications quickly became clear. Studio people themselves simply didn’t respond—for understandable and obvious reasons—but alarm was rapidly spreading virtually everywhere else.

The disruption in home entertainment at Paramount is reportedly so severe that once titles already announced or in the production pipeline arrive in stores, there may be a months-long draught in Paramount Blu-ray, DVD, and 4K Ultra HD disc product, not just from the studio itself but also in terms of deep catalog Paramount titles from all their indie-label licensees. And getting disc production at the studio back up to speed going forward is probably going to require a heavy reliance on outside vendors.

Either way, the situation at the studio isn’t good—very much akin to the disruptions we’ve seen from other major studios that have gone through merger, acquisition, or reorg turmoil, including the Fox sale to Disney, Warner’s seemingly never-ending Zaslav personnel sloughs, and the belt-tightening that happened during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Hopefully, the situation at Paramount will stabilize sooner than later, and new Skydance management will see the value of—and continue to support—physical disc media and home entertainment catalog product as aggressively as the previous studio regime has done. But the situation remains fluid, and the simple fact is we just don’t know what the new owners will see as a priority.

[dwk]

Sounds about right. "Oh no we need money, better stop licensing out titles." Also, why the hell do they have three CEOs?

[swo17]

Also, why the hell do they have three CEOs?

I guess none of them have proved themselves to be head of the class

[Matt]

My understanding is that one (Cheeks) oversees TV production, another (Robbins, yes the “Head of the Class” guy) oversees film production, and the third (McCarthy) oversees cable and streaming. They were all heads of these divisions and promoted into the role of co-CEOs in April after Bob Bakish, the previous sole CEO stepped down. The whole company’s been in a tailspin since Sumner Redstone died in 2020.

[Finch]

Hopefully this won't impact the Bringing Out The Dead release! I was going to wait for a regular edition of Chinatown but now I'm thinking it might be time to act now.

[domino harvey]

It would be wild if Paramount succumbed to the fate of Fox: great representation from the studio on disc turned into great representation on boutique labels for deeper cuts turned into oh actually let’s just ditch all of it and salt the earth

[therewillbeblus]

Hopefully this won't impact the Bringing Out The Dead release!

That'd be wild, especially four weeks out.. I have to imagine discs are being pressed. This film has always felt fated for doom tho

[Finch]

I reread the bolded part in the quote above and it seems like anything already announced or being pressed is safe. BOTD has got to be done at this point. Retailers usually get their allocated copies, like what, 2-3 weeks in advance? As with Chinatown, I was originally going to wait for a standard version but with this upheaval, it might be too risky to hope for a repressing to happen within a reasonable timeframe or even at all (at least from Paramount direct) once the limited edition sells out. Fingers crossed it's one of their better discs.

[Matt]

Yes, that article seems uninformed or at least awkwardly worded. If contracts are signed and discs are in production, they’re going to come out. They might not stay in print long, but they’ll come out. Reneging on contracts and canceling production would drive them into a multitude of lawsuits they’d almost certainly lose and then probably a swift bankruptcy. But hey, given today’s Hollywood logic, maybe that’s what they’re going for.

The “drought” referred to probably means no new licensing contracts signed and no new discs put into production, but we saw this with Paramount some years ago when they pulled tons of their own titles out of print and forced a few of Criterion titles out of print as well.

[domino harvey]

I think it’s also sad that even with all of these deals and movement, I still have Paramount DVDs that haven’t been upgraded (off the top of my head: Hud, Lil Abner, the Matchmaker, Red Garters, so many Jerry Lewis titles, of course the biggest mystery of all, the Miracle of Morgan’s Creek) and now they may never be

[swo17]

I wonder what might happen with Jerry Lewis' films, which Radiance tried to get but Paramount said they wanted to do themselves

[ianthemovie]

What are the chances that more copies of the Chinatown 4K will be coming? I know it's a "limited edition," but it became unavailable almost immediately upon release. I would have pre-ordered but I didn't think it would go away so quickly.

[nicolas]

What are the chances that more copies of the Chinatown 4K will be coming? I know it's a "limited edition," but it became unavailable almost immediately upon release. I would have pre-ordered but I didn't think it would go away so quickly.

You can order the LE right now at Amazon with new stock coming soon. I think Bill Hunt also confirmed that more is on the way.

[crimlaw]

I’m just hoping that Criterion has already licensed Sunset Boulevard, Hud, and Catch-22 from Paramount and is just taking their sweet time in releasing them, just like they did with Paper Moon.

[yoloswegmaster]

Zaz: The Collection! 4K set coming out in November. Includes Airplane, Top Secret, and The Naked Gun.

[Finch]

Paramount are talking a lot about the new 5.1 audio track they created for Sunset Boulevard's 75th anniversary in their restoration notes but the mono track was also restored (but hopefully not filtered and is hopefully going to be included on this summer's 4K release)

[Matt]

Weird that they seem to refer to missing frames as "one-frame jump cuts." Also, great job putting a giant spoiler in your key art.

[DeprongMori]

Given that William Holden narrates the film from the opening scene while floating in a pool dead from gunshot wounds, I’d hardly consider the key art a spoiler.

[andyli]

The back cover of Sunset Boulevard posted over at the other forum indicates that the original mono track will be included (in the form of Dolby TrueHD 2.0 Mono).

[Zot!]

Given that William Holden narrates the film from the opening scene while floating in a pool dead from gunshot wounds, I’d hardly consider the key art a spoiler.

Well we don’t necessarily know who done the deed from the opening scene alone…that’s kind of the narrative arc.

[hearthesilence]

Just out of curiosity, with some of these more famous films like Sunset Boulevard, Citizen Kane, etc...were the endings already known before you saw any of them? It was in my case, like YEARS earlier, even when I was in grade school (thanks to cartoon spoofs).

[DeprongMori]

Given that William Holden narrates the film from the opening scene while floating in a pool dead from gunshot wounds, I’d hardly consider the key art a spoiler.

Well we don’t necessarily know who done the deed from the opening scene alone…that’s kind of the narrative arc.

The opening scene tells you pretty explicitly who did the deed, even if they don’t give her name yet. (Nor do you know from the cover art that it’s a depiction of the final scene — only that at some point in the film she has a gun.)

[Matt]

Ehhhh, that's a stretch. The voice-over only says "You'll get it over your radio and see it on television because an old-time star is involved, one of the biggest" and "You see, the body of a young man was found floating in the pool of her mansion with two shots in his back and one in his stomach." I'd argue the film even leads you to suspect that Max might have fired those shots before it's revealed that Norma did.

Regardless, they could literally have put any other imagery from the film in that art, but they chose to reveal something they didn't need to. It's like knowing there's a twist in a film just makes you anticipate and guess the twist instead of just finding out for yourself. Here, if you've never seen the film, you're shown that this lady has a gun at some point. Then when you see the opening scene, you put two and two together and know immediately that the "old-time star" is the one who shot Joe.

It's the same problem as with their Rosemary's Baby cover art. It makes explicit what is better discovered by watching the film.

[Roger Ryan]

Just out of curiosity, with some of these more famous films like Sunset Boulevard, Citizen Kane, etc...were the endings already known before you saw any of them? It was in my case, like YEARS earlier, even when I was in grade school (thanks to cartoon spoofs).

When I first saw Citizen Kane in 1977 around age 13, I did not know how it ended. I don't think I knew how the crime was handled in Sunset Boulevard when I first saw it but it's not hard to see where it's going. Unfortunately, I can't say the same about Psycho; even though I saw it relatively young, I had read about it in a horror movie book. Still, I was taken aback by how drastically the events in that film change your identification with the characters.