More Amazon Hijinx in the UK
Posted by Dave Cowl
closeAuthor: Dave Cowl
Name: Dave Cowl
Email: dave@formatwarcentral.com
Site: http://www.blu-raystats.com
About: Originally from New Zealand, Dave now resides in the San Francisco Bay Area. With a doctorate in Electrical Engineering, Dave's day job
involves developing high resolution LCoS projectors.
Dave also has a strong interest in cinema and film making, and has
always been an early adopter - he still uses his Sony DVP-S7000 DVD
Player and also owns first generation Blu-ray, HD DVD and DTheater
D-VHS equipment.
Dave has been following the HD Disc format war since the beginning,
which resulted in the Blu-ray Statistics and HD DVD Statistics
websites, designed to track the studio progress with features as they
have released HD media product.See Authors Posts (349) on February 18, 2008
Filed Under: Blu-ray, Format War, Retailers
Amazon UK is at it again with the Paramount/Dreamworks titles.
More Paramount and DreamWorks BD titles recently added to the pre-order list. Here is a smattering of what is on offer:
Cloverfield [Blu-ray]
Bee Movie [Blu-ray]
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow [Blu-ray]
The Kite Runner [Blu-ray]
Zoolander [Blu-ray]
We can also see a Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow [HD DVD] listing.
Keep in mind that Amazon UK has screwed up in the past – though with the recent tide change, this may not be an error…
No related posts.
Should I bother asking who owns the international rights for those films?
No way that Bee Movie arrives on APril 8th.
Does Paramount usually release region-free Blu-rays?
What about April 7?
HD DVD is March 11 here.
Drillbit Taylor is listed for July 21 – that hits the cinema here late march (and in the UK a week later). I wonder what that says for Viacom’s expectations…!
Tim: Yes. They have all been region free to date as far as I know.
I cannot believe that its possible that Paramount could get on a bluray replication line in time to meet an April 7th release date.
But who knows.
I’ve seen a new extra feature on the BBFC website for Sky Captain, and Sahara has been re-certificated. So perhaps new editions?
Why not? With a Blu-Ray Production team (now working full time) a menu system and whatever extras they want to throw in there can be mastered in a few days to a few weeks. Then off to the replicators which takes about a week to make about 50K~100K copies to start. Ship the finish product to their distrubution channels (5-10 days)… nope not hard to do this in 6 weeks.
To be fair to the Blu-Ray camp, Paramount was dual format prior to August of last year so it really wouldn’t take much to fire up the production lines again. That being said I find this article interesting since last time it proved to be an error. Furthermore the US site has not followed suit and since the US almost always gets releases of Hollywood titles first, it just doesn’t seem likely that Amazon UK would have them for Pre-Order and the US site doesn’t have any listings for them.
I am really not sure what to make of it.
To be honest it seems really unlikely that Paramount would give out dates so far ahead for HD DVD since everyone has been expecting tonights news (though of course news can lag).
Also there are HD DVD place holders as well for some of these titles.
Lastly, I did hear from one of my sources that Paramount intended to go BD in Europe before the US. No reason passed on.
On the other hand, Amazon has hardly proven to be reliable in the past. So I guess we wait and see what happens to these – if they stay as they are, change or get deleted…