Warner’s East of Eden & Rio Bravo are coming to 4K Ultra HD in July, plus Jaws 2, Battlestar Galactica & Les Misérables from Universal & more!

Thursday, 25 May 2023 17:26

Warner’s East of Eden & Rio Bravo are coming to 4K Ultra HD in July, plus Jaws 2, Battlestar Galactica & Les Misérables from Universal & more!

by Bill Hunt

All right, we’ve got a few things to share with you today here at The Digital Bits...

First, our own Russell Hammond has completed a major new update of our interactive Release Dates & Cover Artwork section, featuring all kinds of new Blu-ray, DVD, and 4K Ultra HD cover artwork, with Amazon.com pre-order links! All of the latest title announcements are included and we’re going to be adding more every week to keep the section fully up to date. The section also now features an option to sort the displayed page results by format and even by Criterion titles! And as always, whenever you pre-order literally anything from Amazon after clicking through to them from one of our links, you’re helping to support our work here at The Bits and we really appreciate it.

Also, before we get to new release news for this afternoon, today marks the 46th anniversary of the theatrical release of George Lucas’ original Star Wars (1977). It’s also the 43rd anniversary of Richard Marquand’s Return of the Jedi (1983) and the 44th anniversary of Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979). So to celebrate the occasion, we’d like to call your attention to a few of our own Michael Coate’s History, Legacy & Showmanship retrospectives on these films here at The Bits:

A Force to be Reckoned With: Remembering “Star Wars” on its 40th Anniversary

Remembering “Return of the Jedi” on its 30th Anniversary

Celebrate the Love: Remembering “Return of the Jedi” on its 35th Anniversary

Still Screaming in Space: Remembering “Alien” on its 40th Anniversary

All of these are well worth your reading time and are filled with tremendous detail about the production and original theatrical release of these iconic films. [Read on here...]

[Editor’s Note: Today also happens to be Michael’s 10th anniversary of writing for The Digital Bits, and I know I speak for all of us here at the site when I say that we’re very glad to have him on the team!]

Now then, the big release news today is that Warner Bros. Home Entertainment has officially set Elia Kazan’s East of Eden (1955) and Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo (1959) for 4K Ultra HD release on 7/18. Both are titles that we first reported were coming here at The Bits last year. We’re awaiting the studio’s press release, which should drop in the next few days, but in the meantime you can see the cover artwork for them above left and also below.

Also, Universal Studios Home Entertainment has just listed three more 4K Ultra HD catalog titles on Amazon—again, titles that we first reported on here at The Bits many weeks ago. Look for Jeannot Szwarc’s Jaws 2 (1978) on 7/4, followed by Richard A. Colla and Alan J. Levi’s Battlestar Galactica (1978) on 7/11, and Tom Hooper’s Les Misérables (2014) on 7/18. You can see the cover artwork for all three below as well.

A quick update on a Kino Lorber Studio Classics title that the company first announced last year: The company’s anticipated 4K UHD release of William Friedkin’s Bug (2006) has apparently been cancelled. No word as to why, but we do know that Friedkin himself had delayed the release for some time.

In any case, we’ve updated our 4K Ultra HD Release List here at the site with all of this information accordingly.

I also wanted to take a moment this afternoon to shine some positive light on a new Kickstarter: Our old friend and movie soundtrack expert Jeff Bond is working with Creature Features to produce a “definitive, two-volume chronicle on the career and music of one of cinema’s most respected, accomplished and versatile composers.” It’s called The Jerry Goldsmith Companion, and it promises to be loaded with history and detail on Goldsmith’s many fantastic movie soundtracks. If you want to back the Kickstarter, you have 21 days left to do so. Here’s the link!

We’ll return with more release news tomorrow, but in the meantime, here’s a look at the cover artwork for some of the titles mentioned above, plus all SKUs for James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) and Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) on Blu-ray, Blu-ray 3D, and 4K Ultra HD from 20th Century Studios, which are all now available for pre-order on Amazon. We’ve also added the cover art and Amazon pre-order link for Thomas Schlamme’s So I Married an Axe Murderer (1993), which is also now available for pre-order (street date 7/25). Note that we expect the pre-orders for Jaws 2, Battlestar Galactica, and Les Misérables to go live at any time, so be sure to keep checking back...