December’s best Blu-ray and 4K UHD releases: Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny, The Creator, and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds
Also coming in time for holiday shopping are the 4K debuts of Titanic, Point Break, and much more
Aux Features Star Trek
Clockwise from left: Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (Walt Disney Studios), Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (Paramount+), The Creator (20th Century Studios) Image: The A.V. Club
Physical media may be devalued by some in our streaming-dominated world, but you’d be surprised how many great titles are only available on disc. Also, some titles can be so much more rewarding on DVD, Blu-ray, or 4K UHD, especially when they’re loaded with special packaging and bonus features. With that in mind, here’s a look at all the best films that you can spin starting in December 2023, including the physical debuts of recent theatrical movies such as Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny, The Creator, The Exorcist: Believer, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem. Also coming to disc just in time for holiday shopping are the 4K UHD debuts of Titanic, Point Break, a collection of The Ring movies, and much more.
11 Comments
You missed the Babylon 5 blu rays on the 5th which is a pretty serious miss.
Nice, I didn’t know that.It’ll be a pain getting them from here in Italy, but I’ll have to do it.Thanks for the info.
I wonder how those will turn out. Babylon 5 was famous for not using expensive SGI workstations to make its CGI of spaceships but rather consumer-level Amiga computers. It worked surprisingly well, but that was on the small CRT televisions we had then.
It can’t be any worse than seeing really obvious stunt doubles in TOS now that the masking effect of old NTSC-res broadcast TV doesn’t apply.
Whoa, no kidding. I just started a series rewatch the other day on the foot or so of shelf space taken up by my B5 DVD sets. I always wondered if blu-ray would be any sort of improvement on this and now I’m wondering even more; all that old CGI is expectedly primitive, but on a big modern TV it’s soft and blurry as hell. (oddly, it’s sharper on The Gathering, though that’s also in a 4:3 aspect ratio and that might not be coincidence?)
Yes, the Blu-ray will be better, and, yes, a lot of that has to do with the 16:9 presentation on the DVDs. While the show was filmed in 16:9, the FX were created in 4:3. So when they did the DVD conversion, the FX were zoomed in, making them look much more pixelated than even the original broadcasts. The Blu-rays come from the new “remastered” versions they did for (HBO)Max, which were in 4:3, and a considerable improvement over the DVDs. The Blu-rays will also be at a higher bitrate than the Max streaming version, so should be even better still. Unless someone comes along and funds entirely new FX, a la the ST:TOS remastered sets, this is probably the best these episodes are ever going to look.
Honestly, the whole let’s-make-it-wide-screen is a plague for 4:3 shows. About the only one that got it right was The X-files, and that was because they shot it in Super 35.Though it’s not perfect, it’s better done than most. Friends wide-screen looks claustrophobic at times.
Agreed. Leave them with their original aspect ratio. (Except Firefly. That was shot with the intent of being 16:9, but Fox refused to broadcast it that way.)Apparently there’s a “remastered” edition of Buffy TVS out there (not sure if online or on physical media) that has messed with the lighting so much that some of the scenes shot day-for-night are reverted to looking like they take place in broad daylight. With vampires.
Yeah, the X-Files, when it was remastered, had full (cinematic) frames to work with, and the team went through shot-by-shot on the first 3 seasons to try to match the intent as closely as possible; everything after that was in fact shot originally with widescreen in mind so there was no need for cropping.Either way, they had MORE than enough to work with – they even scanned at 4K and downrezzed to 1080p. And the guys who did it, Illuminate, actually spent some of their own money, beyond the budget Fox gave them, to redo some SFX shots. https://www.tweaktown.com/articles/7468/remastering-the-files-hd-jim-hardy-ceo-illuminate/index.htmlAbout the only error in this I can think of with the X-Files was in S02E19, “Død Kalm”, where you can see the mooring line of HMCS Mackenzie tied up to the dock in widescreen when it was meant to a US destroyer adrift in the North Atlantic.
But you know how I know its good? I was watching the early seasons on SBS On Demand, and it wasn’t until like ten eps in I realised “Wait. Wasn’t this all in 4:3?” That’s how ya do it. Apparently there’s a “remastered” edition of Buffy TVS out there (not sure if online or on physical media) that has messed with the lighting so much that some of the scenes shot day-for-night are reverted to looking like they take place in broad daylight. With vampires.Come now, Zircon, surely you’re being dramatic. It really can’t be th-Oh. Oh, dear. Actually, that last one looks like they simply put the raw film scan straight on the Blu-Ray, no tweaking done.
Things are getting pretty dire in the world of physical media if Dial of Destiny is one of the best releases.