I am going to paste an email I sent to a friend in L.A. this morning and his response in regards to getting in contact with someone who we might be able to talk to about a blu-ray transfer. I'll follow up with a few additional observations below the emails:
Original Message I sent:
Since you previously (and even currently) have done some HD restoration work on some films for various studios, I was curious if you might be able to put me in touch with the right person who I would like to talk to about transferring a specific film to Blu-ray.
For a number of years I have had an interest in the Super Mario Bros. film from 1993. While it's not regarded as a great film, I've always really enjoyed it and have worked with a few other people on researching a lot about the making of this film and how it was sort of groundbreaking as the first video game-to-movie translation. Unfortunately, the movie never received a decent DVD transfer or release and the film is still only available as a non-anamorphic, grainy transfer.
We've sent in numerous requests to Buena Vista Home Entertainment to see about getting a better quality version of the film released in its proper aspect ratio but they claim they are just sending the requests to their marketing dept. Now in all fairness, they're only going to transfer films to Blu-ray that will prove to be marketable to them, however over the years we've found that there is quite a bit of deleted and behind-the-scenes footage, as well as concept art that could be compiled into some very good special features to make a Blu-ray release more marketable. In addition to this, in recent years, the film has actually become more of a cult classic and people have been claiming that it's "not such a bad film"....haha
So the reason I wanted to ask you about this is to see if you happened to know anyone over at Disney or within Buena Vista that I might be able to talk to about the potential this film might actually have at being profitable on Blu-ray with such a wealth of compiled research and info that could give a new release more value.
I know this is kind of an odd thing to ask you about, but I figured you might know the right people to talk to about this.
Response
Things are a little weird at Disney now. It is not likely you will have much luck getting them to put much money into that type of film. I don't have any contact with anyone at Disney working on films that recent, but I can ask around. You may have better luck talking with a company with its own distribution network who can partner with whoever owns the rights. This is often done with films that need a targeted audience. Given your description of the current DVD, this may even be what was done in the last release. Buena Vista may have just been involved in the theatrical distribution deal. You can see the company credits for the film on imdb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108255/companycredits
You are probably best talking with whoever is the current owner of the film and seeing where they are at with the Blu-ray release.
So the big revelation here is that maybe we should try contacting the film's producers directly to see who actually owns the rights to the film. Whoever that is will be the person(s) who will have to be convinced that a better version of the film should be released. This would also be the perfect person to plead our case to about the wealth of information we have all put together here and how that can certainly beef up a new release with some great content. It would also finally tell people the true story of what was behind this film and might even give people a greater appreciation for what the filmmakers were trying to accomplish.
I'm honestly not sure if this film is still owned by anyone associated with Lightmotive or Allied Filmmakers, but if so, I believe the chances of getting a hold of someone on that end will be much easier than getting the idea across to Disney, especially if Disney ONLY holds the distribution rights to the film.
This is a VERY optimistic thought, but it seems that convincing the proper owner of the film itself is what it will take to get Disney to re-distribute this film in a better format and with better features. This will be a tough battle, but not an impossible one...
Or we just wait another 5 or so years and hope that Blu-ray titles are so commonplace by then that at the very least we get a bare bones blu-ray edition that MIGHT be in the proper aspect ratio... Lots of maybes and whole lot more hoping...
)
When will they ACTUALLY listen?
