As expected, New Line Cinema has confirmed it will follow Warner Bros. lead in becoming Blu-ray only this year. New Line Cinema is a sister company to Warner and had indicated earlier that it would follow whatever lead Warner took in the format war. At this point in time that makes for a dramatically one-sided picture in the high-definition DVD format skirmish.
I think the EEs would fit on one BD-50 with very high bitrates and lossless audio, but I'd have to sit down and do some theorhetical math. One BD-50 for the feature and one BD-25 for extra features, like Disney did for the POTC movies, sounds about right.
Well, it's going to happen, I wonder if we'll see it on 2008 though. It's certainly possible, compared to DVD we are getting A-list titles fairly early on Blu-Ray. Now that Peter Jackson has meded the relationship with New Line they've just got to decide to do it, and for him to find time to approve the release in between his busy filming schedules.
Without a BD studio going neutral or some other bizarre happening, momentum is not going to swing back, certainly not because this or that catalog title is not yet out.
This really should (and needs to) end the format "war". Granted, Universal and Paramount/Dreamworks could theoretically keep HD-DVD afloat and prolong this needless battle, but I sincerely hope that they won't!
The HD-DVD camp needs to release Paramount from its contract, concede defeat and end this thing as quickly and neatly as possible. Of course, you've got Microsoft backing HD-DVD and who knows what they'll do
New Line Cinema Backs Blu-ray
Linear Mode
