Today is a great example of how the geek wars of gadgetry bring people together when it seemed to rip them apart. Recently it appeared the battle of the High Definition War was coming to a close and the victor was clearly Blu-Ray discs. The sales stats were there, even the president of Universal who is the only supporter of HD-DVD exclusively said that the HDdvd format is fragile and that if he pulled support from it, it would die.
A few weeks, maybe a month or so ago Paramount home Entertainment came forth and said that Blu-Ray is the way to go, and that they were turning all their attention to the blu format because it could hold all their content on one disc including the extras in HD. They explained that HD-DVD was not able to do this. Yesterday Microsoft (aka Satan) who backs HD-DVD slid a nice 150 million dollar check into the pockets of Paramount execs to drop Blu-ray for what we now know is for 18 months. They announced yesterday they were going all HD-DVD.
However, here is the kicker. There was an asterisk on this deal. This deal includes all Paramount titles except those directed by Steven Spielberg. He did not agree with the move. So none of his movies will be available on HD-DVD. (he is in fact working on his first Blu-Ray release of Close Encounters!) Then late yesterday in a counter move Fox came out in total support of Blu-ray. Crazy. I'm not so mad so much about the payola Paramount received because I'm sure that happens everywhere, and I'm sure Blu does the same thing. What pisses me off is that I had several Blu-ray Paramount releases in my Netflix queue and now they are gone. Its just really corporate greed when you see just a few weeks back a company say how much better the technology and sales have been for Blu-Ray, then next week say the opposite in favor of a measly 150 million which is nothing for Paramount. This is really a slap in the face of movie lovers and hard working people. But thats business and sadly I'll have to question paying for any Paramount releases for a while.
On to the title of this post. This morning I logged on to Blu-Ray.com and low and behold the director of The Transformers (big summer flick from paramount and Spielberg) said he is so pissed at Paramount about dropping Blu-Ray that he will not direct Transformers 2. He was probably working hard on the extras for the Blu-Ray release which was announced, and got pissed off. So I am now pleased that he and Steven are standing up for this act of corporate greed. It makes Paramount look really sad and the HD-DVD/Microsft camp look even sadder. Michael my son, you may have atoned for your cinematic sins today. But really other than Hotmail, what good or innovative has Microsoft given us in the last 15 years?
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