August
7
The Star Wars news George Lucas let slip today
[Posted by David S. Cohen]
ComingSoon.net reported a couple of weeks ago that DreamWorks Animation topper Jeffrey Katzenberg confirmed that the Star Wars films are going to be re-released in 3-D. Sometimes that's how these things work with Lucasfilm. There's silence for so long that people forget there hasn't been an actual announcement, and stuff sort of slips out.
That's not exactly news; George Lucas made a big splash at ShoWest 2005 when he appeared onstage to say that he wanted to re-release the Star Wars saga in 3-D. He said so, though, while endorsing the 3-D conversion work of In-Three. In fact, In-Three has a Lucas testimonial page on their website, quoting from Lucas's ShoWest appearance thusly: "one of the reasons I'm promoting it today is I'm extremely anxious to reissue that old group of films I did so long ago in a galaxy far away."
But Thursday's AP interview with the Star Wars mastermind had this:
... he's also looking into re-releasing the six "Star Wars" films using new 3-D technology."We're trying to do that," Lucas said. "We worked on some, with a company that was developing the technology a few years ago to convert films into 3-D, we worked with them. But the system works great. It's just not very practical. So what we've been working on since then is to develop a sort of practical way to do it. And we will get there. It's just a technological challenge."
In other words: Sorry, In-Three, we'll take it from here.
Lucas' own Industrial Light & Magic, which of course did the original Star Wars visual effects, did the 3-D conversion of The Nightmare Before Christmas. Once digital 3-D is fully established there could be a brisk business in 3-D conversions of popular library titles and ILM would be ideally situated to cash in. Which fits with Lucas's approach to business: Why pay someone to do the work you want done, when you can get someone else to pay you to do it?
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Why not create a movie called BackTrack?!
Posted by: fudrucker | August 08, 2008 at 12:17 PM
why!? seriously why!? we've seen so many re releases. the only thing that may benefit from 3-d remakes of episode iv-vi is making the saber fighting better.
Posted by: orange county broadcast media | August 08, 2008 at 12:36 PM
Yet more Lucas bashing from Cohen. Snooze...
Posted by: Mark | August 08, 2008 at 05:14 PM
Well I think it would be cool to see all those Star Destroyers in 3D to get a sense of how massive they are.
Posted by: Cool Star Wars Costumes | August 12, 2008 at 11:27 AM