The wait is over: Paramount has officially confirmed the details of its Blu-ray re-entry plans, with its first titles due for release late next month.
Announced late today via press release (which can be read in full here), the studio will kick off their Blu-ray support on May 20, with the release of 'Face/Off,' 'Next,' and 'Bee Movie.'
Paramount will follow that up on June 3 with the release of 'Cloverfield' and 'There Will Be Blood. Then on June 24 we'll see the debut of 'The Spiderwick Chronicles,' which will launch day-and-date with the standard DVD.
"Paramount Home Entertainment continues to focus on the consumer and to explore avenues that allow fans to get more out of their home entertainment experience," said Kelley Avery, President of Worldwide Home Entertainment, Paramount Pictures. "We will have a strong slate of titles for Blu-ray release throughout the year worldwide and are enthusiastic about expanding the format's offerings for a broad consumer audience while delivering an experience that goes beyond what viewers love about DVD."
Full tech specs are not yet in for the newly-announced titles, though preliminary details in the press release indicate that the supplemental content on the Blu-ray versions will mirror the previously-released standard DVD and HD DVD versions.
Paramount's announcement follows weeks of anticipation among early adopters. The studio initially launched a format-agnostic approach to the format war in 2006, only to defect to HD DVD late last year in a widely publicized announcement. Following Toshiba's war-ending abandonment of the HD DVD format earlier this year, Paramount again switched allegiance to Blu-ray, though the studio had yet to issue details of its initial release plans.
Universal recently announced their Blu-Ray plans as well. This makes all of the Big Six Hollywood studios (Paramount, Sony, Fox, Warner, Universal, and Disney/Buena Vista) on board with Blu-Ray. Lionsgate (a mini-major) is onboard as well. Weinstein (the smallest of all these) has yet to announce their switch to Blu-Ray, but rumor has it that they have something in the pipeline and we will here about it before Q2 is over.
We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. –Raoul Duke
It is hard to shed anything but crocodile tears over White House speechwriter Patrick Buchanan's tragic analysis of the Nixon debacle. "It's like Sisyphus," he said. "We rolled the rock all the way up the mountain...and it rolled right back down on us...." Neither Sisyphus nor the commander of the Light Brigade nor Pat Buchanan had the time or any real inclination to question what they were doing...a martyr, to the bitter end, to a "flawed" cause and a narrow, atavistic concept of conservative politics that has done more damage to itself and the country in less than six years than its liberal enemies could have done in two or three decades. -Hunter S. Thompson
