Tuesday, March 4th, will see the last HD DVD releases from Paramount and DreamWorks Animation – Into the Wild and Things We Lost in the Fire, both from Paramount. All previously announced HD DVD releases due after 3/4 are canceled. Those titles are Bee Movie (3/11), The Jack Ryan Collection (3/25), The Kite Runner (3/25), Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (4/1), and There Will Be Blood (4/15). So, while Paramount and DreamWorks Animation were the last major studios to official announce the end of their HD DVD effort, it seems they will be the first to actually drop the format due to the abrupt nature of their plans. They did the same thing when they switched from format neutral to HD DVD, canceling Blu-ray releases that were already in retailers’ hands.
This means no high-def releases from the two studios for a couple of months, as they plan to begin distributing their films on Blu-ray this summer. I imagine that the HD DVD films that were dropped will be undergoing a crash remastering effort for Blu-ray. Picked up from High-Def Digest, Video Business, and The Hollywood Reporter.
