First Titles on Blu-Ray announced

[gram99]

Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, Lionsgate and Paramount Pictures Home Entertainment have announced the first titles to be released on the Blu-ray Disc high-definition format.

The new releases will include:

Aeon Flux
Behind Enemy Lines
Black Hawk Down
Bram Stoker's Dracula
The Bridge on the River Kwai
The Fifth Element
Desperado
The Devil's Rejects
Dune
Fantastic Four
For a Few Dollars More
Four Brothers
The Guns of Navarone
Hitch
House of Flying Daggers
Ice Age
The Italian Job
Kiss of the Dragon
A Knight's Tale
Kung Fu Hustle
Lara Croft: Tomb Raider
The Last Waltz
Legends of the Fall
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
Lord of War
The Manchurian Candidate
Mission: Impossible
Mission: Impossible 2
Mission: Impossible 3
The Punisher
Rambo: First Bloodx
Reservoir Dogs
Resident Evil Apocalypse
Robocop
Sahara
Saw
Sense and Sensibility
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
Stealth
Species
SWAT
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow
Total Recall
U2: Rattle and Hum
We Were Soldiers
XXX

According to Reuters, more studios are expected to announce their high-definition launch slates this week.

Wonder how much the players will be?

[poissony]

Any news on when they'll actually be launched?

[w_n_s]

Anyone seen Aeon Flux - Absolute tosh! Anyway thats for another thread.

Blu-ray will bomb. DVD versions will be cheaper and everyone has a DVD player and they only cost like £20!

HD TV hasn't even hit the mainstream and hardly anyone has one to take advantage of the format. I certainly won't entertain the thought of Blu-ray until I have a HD-TV / projector - that will not be anytime soon and that goes for a lot of people out there!

No doubt the likes of Dixons will be pushing blu-ray on unsuspecting customers saying it will give them a far better picture on their 15 - 20" CRT TV's when compared with a DVD player.

[Just]

Wonder how much the media will be too!

It is an interesting list of titles as with DVD when that came out (I had to buy Godzilla just to see what a DVD film looked like!). I can't really see A Few Dollars More being worth the HD effort as it must look pretty ropey on the masters. Ice Age though would be a different matter.....

[kiran_mk2]

I'm sure they can play some dirty tricks such as cutting back special features on DVDs or releasing the HD versions sooner (even if the first wave are 720p single layered efforts just awaiting a rerelease).

[Sprout Crumble]

Wonder how much the players will be?

So far, IIRC, Pioneer have announced their Blu-Ray player at $1800 and Samsung (BD-1000) at $1000.
Toshibas HD-A1 HD-DVD player is March at $499.

Thats a huge difference. On top of that, one manufacturer has said that a manufacturing line for HD-DVD produces twice as many usable discs as their Blu-Ray line in the same time period and the equipment to produce them costs half as much mainly because HD-DVD is a development of traditional DVD.
In consumer terms the name alone is a huge advantage, in manufacturing terms its way cheaper, faster and therefore more profitable and in support terms it has Microsoft backing it (some analysts claiming thats the killer app).

Whats obvious though, is that we're all going to suffer a slowdown in takeup because of the split and run the risk of buying a dud. This quote is also quite telling... "Analysts at Sanford Bernstein estimated that media companies could collectively lose as much as $16 billion over seven years if HD DVD and Blu-ray were launched without a clear favorite, because without a clear-cut winner, consumers would be leery of buying one or the other."

As usual, the consumer suffers. DVD was unified on release and it became the fastest adopted consumer technology ever, despite early fears that the lack of recordability would kill it. Again, the manufacturers have learnt nothing and we have Sony and Philips to thank for that. Cheers.

Just noticed that many of the titles in the first post are also announced for HD-DVD and will likely hit the market first.

Pioneers computer Blu-Ray drive will apparently be $995. Scratch that one off the list as well then.