I was at Blockbuster this afternoon and they were starting to put out Don Cheadle's Traitor. I said, "I thought that didn't come out until Friday?" and she told me, "It was, but we just got a call from home office saying they were letting stores release it today."


Now, not every store may be aware of this change, but stores CAN put it out for sale today, so YMMV. (I saw it for sale at 1 additional store after that, but not at a couple others I visited today).

i hope that many people will now come to realize that the dvd release is NOT presented in the original theatrical aspect ratio of 2,35, but in 1,78!!!

yes, there was a whole thread bitching about that (myself included), but it is what it is, nothing we can do about it now.

how is this movie? i love don cheadle (spelling?) in everything he has been in. . .even "colors"! i have not heard much about this movie though. this may be a blind buy either way but i was just curious. . .thanks and take care.

^DONT BUY IT!!!!!!! IT's in the WRONG ASPECT RATIO. (unless of course you are talking about buying the Blu-ray then nevermind I guess although I would hope you wouldn't support any version of this movie to send a message to Starz/Anchor BAy to not do this to movies on DVD.)

Give me Pearce and McDounough commentary and Id be all over this; no matter the ratio.

I've had it for a while. I like the movie a lot, and from what I can remember from the theatre, it doesn't look like it's cropped to 1.78:1 but rather opened up. I couldn't recollect any picture information missing on the sides.

I watched it last night.

It looked to be 2.35x1, certainly did not fill screen on my 16x9 HD set

were you watching Blu-ray? BD has correct aspect ratio, SD does not

Somebody tell Netflix this news.

It's going to take me a day or two to get everything pieced together for the review, but I can confirm it is, in fact, 1.78:1. The other thing I can confirm -- and this might be a first -- is that the Traitor DVD starts out with the age-old "This Film Has Been Modified From Its Original Version" display typically used for full-frame altered DVDs. Let's hope that we're not going to start seeing differing 1.78 and 2.35 releases in the future.

Boo. Anchor Bay is as lame as Lion's Gate with this non OAR release. I was going to get this, but will just skip it altogether now.

I can't understand the studios and their non-standard 'stunt' release dates.
All that ends up happening is that retailers end up breaking them.
Eagle Eye? With a SUNDAY release (now Saturday soft date??) Really??

Being a fan of the film, I didn't really think the DVD aspect ratio is that big of an issue. Others might disagree of course, on principle.

I compared DVD scenes to the Blu-ray and it seems there's a mixture of opening up as well as cropping. But for the most part, it seems the screen has been opened up. Below is a screen comparison, DVD top, Blu-ray bottom.

And another one:

if you're watching the regular dvd release and you're getting black bars then you have something set up wrong.

Well, I was pretty pissed about this, but I'm okay with it I guess, since it appears that rather than crop the sides and expanding it to make it 1.85, they just opened up the top and bottom of the 2.35 a bit. Still dumb that they changed the OAR, but not awful.

Gives me a good reason to buy a BR player....I'll have to hide my HD-Player now I suppose.

-Tim

Came from Netflix yesterday, pretty good film.

Don't know about the cropping, but to me the disc looked great.