Why are none of 2Pac's movies on Blu-Ray?

[donfathaimmortal]

Although it ain't the topic of the year, it's alsmost one of the most constructive discussion I've seen in a while @ DubccForum
#JimmyH #Deeeznuuuts83

[Jimmy H.]

I didn't say that a cult following was needed, but it helps warrant a re-release of some sort, regardless of whether we're talking about a bonus feature-filled special edition or a Blu-Ray update.  And how are you gauging the size of the followings of those movies that got the Blu-Ray treatment?  Box office gross?  Just curious.  (And it's not a fair comparison if you're looking at the box office gross of indie films that have extremely limited releases anyway that likely aren't going to generate much money, as they will rely more on the home media sales to generate profit.)

  I'm looking at general appeal on this one. DVD studios like Echo Bridge and Mill Creek put out a lot of lesser known movie titles on budget DVD and Blu-Ray.  I'm talking forgotten box office films like the Puppet Masters with Donald Sutherland, the later direct-to-video sequels to Hellraiser, In Too Deep with LL Cool J and Omar Epps, and loads of pretty good Dolph Lundgren films from the mid-90's that nobody but me actually remembers. These definitely aren't big cult favorites.

And whether it's costly/risky or not, it's still something where the company needs to ask themselves if it's worth their time and effort to put out physical copies of it.  Similarly, a lot of the more recent Death Row/WIDEawake releases had EXTREMELY limited releases for the actual CDs and relied more on selling the digital downloads.  Why?  Because most people these days will do the latter, and despite the potential audience for it being a few millions (which was Death Row's following at its peak), those that would actually buy it (whether the physical CD or the digital download) is far more limited.

I don't think the WIDEawake comparison works at all.  Music and film are two widely different mediums at this point. There are far more limited outlets to sell music than there is to sell movies. You're not going to sell unreleased music from decades ago at a full retail price as the main attraction and expect to make keep a company afloat off it.

So basically, they'd do the same thing that they did when putting out the DVD release, but in Blu-Ray quality.  So any flaws in any of the frames will still be present (which was the case, as it's not as if the DVD releases were all of flawless DVD quality), except the Blu-Ray one is sharper and nicer on a bigger screen, which is kind of pointless.  Unless it is remastered.  Yes, I bring it up, but it's because they might as well clean it up in some way if they're going for a retail HD release.

Except that DVD quality isn't flawless and not a lot of people consider it pointless. You do know that movies that are released today on both Blu-Ray and DVD are sourced from the same masters, right? If you were to buy, say the new Hunger Games movie or Pacific Rim or one of those other big special effects film, the DVD is coming from an HD source. The format just isn't capable of capturing it as well as Blu-Ray so the picture quality is weaker.  The same goes for older films. Film restoration is done to preserve the look of film, which can deteriorate over time if not properly handled. This has nothing to do with improving it so it looks good for HD. 35mm film picture is sharper and more detailed than HD video. HD is catching up but it ain't there yet. There is this misconception that older films aren't worth looking at in HD because they are older and thus the picture quality will never be that good. This just plain isn't true.

To put in simpler terms, it would be like recording the same program on VHS tape as you did with a DVD recorder. Yes, if the master had picture issues, they would be evident on both but the playback would be much more clear on the DVD, wouldn't it?

But let's be honest... how many retail stores do you think will order it?  (Rhetorical question.)  I remember when Fast & Furious 6 came out (which was a huge movie -- close to $800 million worldwide at the box office), some big stores didn't have many copies of them.  There was a Target exclusive Steelbook Blu-Ray that came with the soundtrack (which I figured I might as well get, since all of the store exclusives were more or less the same price), and the first Target I went to didn't even carry it, and they only had maybe ten copies of the regular Blu-Ray there.  And that was when the store opened on the day the film was released.  I had to go to a second Target two or three miles away to find it, and even that store had only maybe twenty copies of it on Blu-Ray (including the special Target version).  Both were in highly populated cities, and we're talking about a very huge movie with a huge fanbase.  So I still have a hard time seeing a lot of stores ordering even a handful of Pac movies on Blu-Ray.

You can have as hard a time with it as you choose.  I'm not really following you with the "Fast & Furious" example either.  Are you suggesting that stores don't carry Blu-Ray or what?

[DeeezNuuuts83]

Except that DVD quality isn't flawless and not a lot of people consider it pointless. You do know that movies that are released today on both Blu-Ray and DVD are sourced from the same masters, right? If you were to buy, say the new Hunger Games movie or Pacific Rim or one of those other big special effects film, the DVD is coming from an HD source. The format just isn't capable of capturing it as well as Blu-Ray so the picture quality is weaker.  The same goes for older films. Film restoration is done to preserve the look of film, which can deteriorate over time if not properly handled. This has nothing to do with improving it so it looks good for HD. 35mm film picture is sharper and more detailed than HD video. HD is catching up but it ain't there yet. There is this misconception that older films aren't worth looking at in HD because they are older and thus the picture quality will never be that good. This just plain isn't true.

But you can only improve the picture so much.  I never said that there wouldn't be any benefits of HD (which again is not what is being discussed -- we are talking about the actual production of BLU-RAY discs), but again, the ORIGINAL picture quality is only going to be as good as whatever technology there was at the time.  And it's not even about the media itself today -- but regardless of the 35mm film, you have to consider that our cameras, lens, etc. today are all better than they were yesterday, which were better than the ones from years before that, which were better than the ones decades before that, so on and so forth.  You can take old films like Casablanca, Citizen Kane, etc. and put out HD releases (whether digital downloads or Blu-Ray discs), and while its specs will be HD (resolution, aspect ratio, etc.), the picture quality itself is limited by the craptastic cameras from decades ago.  And I think that's what I'm getting at.  I was reminded of it last night when Son-in-Law was on TV (and of course I was watching it on an HD channel), and with it being a 20+ year-old film now, I appreciated the HD broadcast but didn't feel it was one of those films that really "needed" it.

Sports is a different story -- if you watch anything now, whether football or boxing, the HD benefits are clear (no pun intended).  But you can take games from years ago, whether they're Michael Jordan's highlights or Bill Russell's from years before that, and watch them on ESPN HD, and while it's better than watching it on regular TV, the picture quality itself visually doesn't end up looking like it was filmed with 2014 camera equipment.

You can have as hard a time with it as you choose.  I'm not really following you with the "Fast & Furious" example either.  Are you suggesting that stores don't carry Blu-Ray or what?

I was talking about the Blu-Ray/DVD availability of a HUGE movie the day of its release in a number of stores in a highly populated area, and having to go to a second store to find what I wanted while noting how few copies overall the store carried.  So with that in mind, do you really think that a lot of stores are going to order a bunch of copies of Juice, Poetic Justice, Above the Rim, etc. if Blu-Ray releases saw the light of day?  And these are movies that grossed $20 million-ish at the box office.

But again, it's because stores just don't order as many copies of any media as they used to, often due to digital downloads, whether legitimate purchases or illegal filesharing.  And while movies and music aren't the same, they've both been similarly impacted by downloading.  Remember the days when albums would come out, and you'd see rows and rows (and boxes and boxes under it) of that new CD?  Those days are long gone.  I bought both the Jay-Z and Eminem albums last year at Best Buy the day they came out, and there may have been 20-30 copies max at the store.  And the same thing is happening to movies.  When the Matrix movies came out on DVD, you'd see huge displays holding a hundred of the DVDs in them.  Not anymore.

[Sir Petey]

No.  It is not. Between theatrical, home video, cable, and television, these movies are all in the black. HD masters exist for mostly all of them as most networks would require them so they could be picked up.

But that's not what is in discussion.  The thread starter was asking why none of Pac's movies are available in BLU-RAY format.  I have no problem with the movie being available in HD format.

Once again, wrong. There are millions of people out there who love to watch and collect movies. For those with high-level HD TV's and surround systems, watching their favorite movies on standard definition video or DVD won't cut it.

All of Pac's movies were released in the '90s, when VHS was the dominant format.  By the time DVDs were the new standard while being accessible to the average person and pretty much any movie you'd want was available in DVD format in the 2000s, it would be a rare occasion where a household had a Pac movie or two on DVD, unless there were a serious Pac fan in that household.

The big misconception here, and this was more started by the initial thread, than specifically by you, is that films that feature Tupac in them only appeal to Tupac fans and hip-hop heads exclusively. There is an audience beyond that for some of these films. And using the DVD sales argument would only work if it was clear that not enough bought them, which isn't likely the case.

Since there isn't really a source that makes DVD sales numbers available, then the argument can go in either direction since we can't really prove how good or bad a DVD sold.  But outside of Juice and Poetic Justice and maybe even Above the Rim, the movies weren't really given much thought outside of the hip-hop fanbase, especially when it's not like the other movies got good reviews anyway.  Even Gang Related, with all of its stars, had poor ratings.  And at the same time, there are movies that didn't quite take off at the box office but really found a large following when it hit home media, like Shawshank Redemption, Donnie Darko, etc.  I never really heard much about the other Pac movies gathering a even a cult following upon home media release, and it's not all magically going to change with a Blu-Ray release.

This theory is wrong all over the boards. I'm assuming you have HD conversion confused with film restoration, which is very expensive and time-consuming, and is usually reserved for specific films where there is an audience for it and/or need to preserve for a given purpose. New audiences grow everyday. We're not just talking about selling physical discs to thirty-year-old males who already own these movies on DVD and VHS anymore.

With an HD master, the film also can be sold through video-on-demand channels, distributed for cable, and so on and so forth. They do this kind of shit everyday with much smaller films that don't have nearly as big an audience.

As for the original stuff not being in "such high quality anyway". I can't even understand where you're coming from. All these films were shot on 35MM film. Film stock is actual higher quality than HD and blows away DVD picture. Maybe some will argue that the cinematography of these films just isn't worth seeing in the best quality possible but there's not much I can say to a person who would honestly question upgrading from a pan & scan VHS copy of a film they love to a digital or high-definition one.

The super 35 film doesn't necessarily mean it was in the greatest to begin with, otherwise every movie ever filmed would be in its best quality from the get-go with few adjustments needed.  But that's not always the case, even when comparing releases on the same format.  Compare the original Scarface DVD release (with the black-and-white cover) to the 20th anniversary digitally remastered, digitally restored, digitally whatevered DVD release (with the black-and-silver cover).  Or compare the original Terminator 2 DVD to the later special releases, like the Ultimate Edition (with that silver metal case) or the Extreme Edition (with the Terminator exoskeleton face on the cover).  Yeah, I owned all of those that I just mentioned.  I used to read dvd.ign.com a lot when I was in college and pretty much buying DVDs every Tuesday morning, and they had very detailed side-by-side comparisons of re-releases.

So even though they all came from the same super 35 film, then there could be a lot of improvement that can be made from movies released two or more times on the same format, as we've seen before, like in the examples I mentioned.  And those updates required time and money to have it done.  It's not just someone pressing "enhance image" for the movie file on a computer.

So what is your point exactly? That Blu-Rays will only turn profit for titles that YOU want to buy?

No, my point was that I already own the DVDs and don't really plan on buying them if they came out on Blu-Ray.  If the quality is better by 1% or 100%, like you said earlier, it could be argued that the cinematography doesn't really warrant that much sharper of an available copy.  Similarly, I own all of the Friday movies on DVD.  While I don't doubt that the movies on Blu-Ray (whether they are available or not) would be nicer, do I really care to upgrade my copy to HD for another $10-20?  Not really.  But some special effects-heavy movie would be a different story.  My movie collection is already cluttered as it is, and I don't really need to buy two of the same movie, especially when Blu-Ray players play DVDs too.

Also, the problem with actually releasing a BLU-RAY variant of each of Pac's movies is the fact that the financials need to be in line, like I mentioned.  We've talked about the costs of converting it (along with whatever remastering/restoring that needs to occur in the process) and then pressing up the discs themselves and shipping them out against how many people would go to stores (or Amazon) and buy them, but with so many people just keeping stuff in the Cloud, it's way easier for people to just download movies digitally through iTunes, Flixster, etc. since it's so easy to use and play on a number of devices these days, and there's no need for a disc.  Skipping a Blu-Ray release and just going straight to digital release is likely a lot easier for them to do behind the scenes and easier to meet the demand (rather than guessing how many copies to press and hoping that stores order them).

You seem like an expert. Make this guy an admin.

come to yemen kuffar

[Seagully]

Ugh what happened to this forum?

[ez8o5]

blue ray is a sinking ship anyways

[Matty]

spambot is the cherry on top, they always love some blu-ray action

[Sccit]

Ugh what happened to this forum?

THIS GUYS SAYS THIS IN EVERY THREAD HE POSTS IN LMAO


GETS MAD WHEN 2PAC THREADS GET MADE....MAKES 2PAC THREAD

[GangstaBoogy]

Ugh what happened to this forum?

THIS GUYS SAYS THIS IN EVERY THREAD HE POSTS IN LMAO


GETS MAD WHEN 2PAC THREADS GET MADE....MAKES 2PAC THREAD

1. no I don't
2. I don't get mad I just think there should be a separate section for 2Pac. But since there isn't this would be the place to post it.

stop monitoring my post bruh

[Sccit]

lmfao@monitoring