Universal's Blu-ray release plans uncovered, details later today
By Richard Lawler 
posted April 17th 2008 4:17AM
posted April 17th 2008 4:17AM
We won't have to wait long to find out Universal's plans for Blu-ray, Reuters just noted that later today the studio will announce plans to release about 40 movies on the format in the second half of the year, including Doomsday. The only studio to support solely HD DVD from the beginning will come out with all three of its Mummy films: The Mummy, The Mummy Returns, and The Scorpion King July 22 (sounds like someone's bitter about HD DVD and taking it out on Blu-ray owners to us), with catalog releases jumping over from red like Miami Vice, Knocked Up, American Gangster and others before the year is out. Keep an eye out for specifics later on, like whether those U-Control and community features from the HD DVD versions will make the jump intact
I'll forgive them as long as they give me Heroes. :D
Ask and ye shall receive: http://www.highdefdigest.com/news/show/Universal/TV_on_High-Def/Disc_Announcements/Heroes_Double-Header_Coming_to_Blu-ray_this_August/1659
"(sounds like someone's bitter about HD DVD and taking it out on Blu-ray owners to us)"
I'm not a big fan of the Mummy series either, but I do rather suspect it has more to do with the new Mummy film coming out on August 1st than anything else. The anti-Blu execs have been given the shove at Universal.
Ugh, another Mummy movie? I sort of liked the first but the second and the Scopion King spinoff were just awful.
dont buy em. period. the all mighty dvd format doesnt have the prefect movies either.
All I care about is Gladiator from Universal/Dreamworks; I guess that's why i didn't miss them when they were not making Blu, but i'm glad they're now on board! Then again, they didn't even release Gladiator on HD-DVD so its really been a long waiting game.
ENGADGET HD, i'm not sure if you are aware but the commenting system is really buggy. After making a comment, it doesn't come straight away, and it takes a while. Even now, it says there are "4 comments made", even though three are present.
Buggy, and visually confusing. I just replied to somebody in Engadget and managed to reply to the guy above by mistake. Some color hints wouldn't go amiss.
this new engadgethd sucks doesnt it. well to me at least.
I'm all thumbs up for having as many titles as possible on the "winning" HD format. I might not have bought into the whole things myself but I'll be glad to have choices if and when I do.
Universal has clearly managed to secure some post production facilities. Can't have been easy with everyone else fighting for them too. I don't see many Universal titles in that list I would want to own, but the more the merrier. I wonder if they'll re-do their existing HD-DVD titles or shove them out the way they are now. American Gangster will be interesting to see if they put the extended edition on the disk or not.
"Serenity", now!
As long as I get Serenity, King Kong, Heroes, and Battlestar Galactica on Blu-ray, I'll be thrilled.
So whe're's Paramount/Dreamworks? I've got a list for them too...
"Back to the Future" trilogy too, while you're at it.
arg, forget hd-dvd titles. I already have all those. How about releasing some titles that desperatly need the HD treatment, like jurassic park series. I tried to watch jurassic park from my dvd the other day and the quality is so crap its unwatchable. Its deffeintly a very poor transfer I can see after watching on a nice HD set. What a waste of money on those dvds. If jurassic park 4 ever gets off the ground, im sure HD versions of 1-3 will be released around movie time for the extra $ - Like what they are doing here with the mummy series as a tie in to the the mummy 3.
try the superbit releases i was quite impressed
I hope this means they've managed to port U-Control over to BD-J. Unlike some, I actually do find value in the extra features.
U-control, heck, let's have every studio with wildly different control interfaces. Some use menus, some use the audio and display buttons, some use color keys (making universal remotes hard to use). Now bring U-control!
With DVDs I know how to set up a movie without a lot of thought. With Blu, though, it's really the Wild West. Now they're going to embed HD-I into BD-J? How about some standards?!? Is that too much to ask?
It won't be HDi though there is no reason that Microsoft couldn't reposition HDi as middleware which is turned into Java.
I do think the studios do need to agree some common functionality. For example, if BD-J discs wrote out bookmarks in a common format, it would be easy for players to resume or arrange them.
Comment system sucks, BTW.
the final blow to hd-dud.
Yeah... you were left in the dust ages ago, weren't you? Universal announced their switched a little more than a month ago, I believe.
And please don't call it "HD DUD", it makes you look stupid.
my bad, must've been a typo...
Cause they're so close together...
Still not interested in Blu-ray.
Universal, you are forgiven. Guess I got to re-buy The Mummy and The Mummy Returns. I owned those 2 in HD DVDs, but just for test (no more HD DVD for me). The rest of my hi-def movies are all in Blu-ray (I own 77 BDs to date). Long Live Blu-ray.