ID4 Blu-ray isn't the longer cut? Wonderful.
 

One of the titles I was looking forward to getting later this year on Blu-ray was Independence Day. And now I come to find out it's not the longer cut. Wonderful.

I guess double-dipper version is going to be released at some point in the future?

Its also missing nearly all the special features as well from the 5-6 DVD versions that have been available. But hey, it does come with a nifty alien fighting java game!

Well thank god! Wouldn't want to justify the added expense in any way, would we now?

There's a longer cut of this "entertaining, would be better if it were a half hour shorter" aka "already bloated" movie? :jawdrop:

Theres no excuse for multiple versions not being on the disc, and the dropping of extras is BS. Though the longer version not being the one released in HD isn't something I'm particularly concerned about.

Yea, this ticked me off too. I don't understand what Fox's wacky logic is with their Blu-Ray releases. I mean, how hard can it be to port the extras over? And if it needs a second disc, then by all means give it a second disc. They're already charging us $40 for the damn thing, they might as well add some weight to it.

I'd also love every release to be definitive, but double dips must have been profitable enough to justify this kind of thing. Its hard to believe anyone is surprised by this kind of stuff anymore.

I like the theatrical version better than the extended but I have to say. We HD adopters are just getting royally fucked. Fox has released so many blu-rays without any features. We were arguably screwed by Universal for not including both cuts of American Gangster on the disc.

I don't think double dips are inevitable either. Maybe when blu-ray replication costs come down. I'm sure studios make more money on original releases than they do on re-releases.

Why couldn't Fox do branching like Warner did with I Am Legend on ID4? Fox just bugs me. They would rather add little stupid Java games that only work properly on the PS3 and D-Box that no one owns then make the disc as complete as possible compared to the SD versions. Then of course charge $40 MSRP for it.

As for American Gangster HD DVD, both cuts are present, but the extended is just on the SD side. Still sucks.

Being this is HD, it's setting a new low for movie studios. I don't think I'm ever going to buy a Fox title on Blu-ray. Fuck'em. I'll upconvert all their SD DVD releases.

It's been this way with their DVDs as well. It's not an HD adopter thing.

That'll show 'em!

Fox is the worst as far as Blu-Ray releases. Independence day is one of my favorite movies but it was rather grainy imo. I think the worst Fox release was KOH. 4 disk set to just 1 bare-bones disk.

WB has been decent. Alexander got all the features transferred and then some. I was particularly happy to get an Oliver Stone Commentary where as it wasn't on the SD release.

I wanted to ask by starting a thread but now I don't have to.

To all of you who owns this BD version of the film, I ask:

Does the film still have a soft look to it? The review mentioned good picture quality but I've seen this film countless times not only on DVD, but theatrically as well and it always looked very soft. Detailed, but still much softer compared to most films I've seen.

If I had the money, this is the one film I'd jump into Blu-Ray for.

I like most of the extended cut scenes, except for two:

-Russell Casse has an argument with his stepson.
It's not what's being said, but the delivery of the lines - the acting seems so high school drama class.

-Russell's daughter hooking up with Brian Krakow ( ;) ) during the final battle sequence.
Again, it's not so much the dialogue but the line delivery.

The remaining scenes are a welcome addition, though the Oval Office scene with the Levinsons plays more like an outtake stuck into the middle of the "Welcome Wagon" choppers flying overhead shot.

Nifty? Not even close. One of the lamest games that has shown up on a video disc yet. And that's saying a lot!

Agreed... as usual in most cases, the theatrical version is better. :thumbsup:

Fox has already announced a double dip on Alien vs. Predator sometime this year, you just know ID4 will get one next year - I mean as has already been pointed out there are 6 or so DVD versions and DVD is only a about 12 years old.

You must not sense sarcasm.

What do you mean? :confused:

followed by:

The "wonderful" part was sarcasm. Like if I were to say "Fox is charging $80 for ID4. Wonderful". I'm not happy Fox is charging $80 for a movie. Nevermind.

Thanks, I must've missed that text when I copied and pasted the thread title over it. ;)

Don't feel bad. John Sinnott's sarcasm detector wasn't working either, judging by his response to the quote about the Java game. :)

BTW, I agree that the theatrical (or original, as I've taken to calling it lately) cut is often better. Of course it depends on the movie.

Given that I never got around to watching the extras or the dir cut on the previous version(s), I don't really care here. As long as the A/V is good (which it sounds like it is) that'll be fine with me. So, I'm just taking it on a case by case basis for my BD's. You want to wait - fine. I'll have fun revisiting ID4 this summer.

LOL you find out something new every day. I think I've watched the 5-Star DVD once since I got it and didn't even realize it was 9 minutes longer. It's been years since I've see it. Not that it shouldn't have been the longer cut though.

A movie that runs 2 hours, 24 minutes and is directed by Roland Emmerich certainly doesn't need additional footage. I was able to get an hour of this watched tonight. I'll gladly revisit this one, among the many Fox titles I own, when I get a new receiver that can decode DTS HD MA. The DTS "core" track sounded great. I imagine the full mix will blow the doors off.

If this had been a reasonably priced disc I would have bought it special features or not. As it stands I just rented it from NetFlix as it appears that Fox is taking the same over-priced approach it used in the early days of DVD.

For what it's worth I thought the image was pretty great but it sure wasn't $30 great.

Well in my opinion,the only people we can blame for the prices are us, the consumer.We keep buying these movies at these prices, so why would they drop the prices.HD-DVD going down didnt help. With no one to compete with now,I would think they will leave prices where they are or even raise them a little(on disc & players). It's a business, if we buy them at these prices,why not(for them).

For me, I'm not going BD till I can buy a player for what I got my A35 for($149). In the mean time my A35 does a great job with upconverting :) . There is no movie I need to see for me to go out and buy a BD player for $500 and up(since I would want it to output lossless audio like my A35).
Ok I might for The Lord of The Ring Trilogy :), maybe. just my two cents :)

I tried to cover that in my post #11. But more words are good.

I don't buy titles if the price is to high. I passed on ID4 and I, Robot due to the high prices. Its no longer an "impulse" buy to me. If I saw these for $19.99 at Best Buy, I'd grab both, even with the lack of extras. However they are $34.99 with, if lucky, 1/5th the extras present on the SD version(s), and simply not worth my money.

The only Fox title I have purchased Day and Date was X-Men III, and even then it was months after the SD version but still a new release to Blu-ray. Every other Fox title was purchased via BOGO or sale on Amazon.

The name of the game is patience!!! I'll light myself on fire before I pay $35 for any dvd. I have the standard versions and a great upconvert and they will suffice until these prices come down. I would bet I can get I Robot and Independance Day on ebay in a month or two for significantly less. I'm also not too proud to buy a used copy (thank God for the scratch resistance coating on the blu ray). Luckily, Amazon had a great sale on I Am Legend. I have no problem spending $18 for a blu ray. Once again, no one says you need to go out and buy it on the release date.

I ordered ID4 from Amazon back when it was supposed to be released and the price was $23.95. Dropping $27.95 or more for Blu-rays are ridiculous.

Exactly. Why should Fox just sell you a movie once, when they can sell it to you three times? Ka-ching!

We need a "Fox's latest Blu-ray shenanigans" thread.

People need to stop buying the releases with stripped off features if they care at all about them. One of the reasons I own so few blu-rays is that Fox is the worst studio for this. Sony/Columbia has been getting better at not doing this lately (they were another offender), but Fox hasn't improved at all.

Fox's upcoming Master and Commander disc has 4 deleted scenes and the trailer, everything else is gone. I had sold my single disc DVD last year in prep for the BD release (I wasn't onto Fox yet).
After reading it was a stripped down BD, AGAIN, I just picked up the 2-disc SE used for cheap. Fox can bite me.

More fuel for what I said in the "I'm not impressed" thread. I do see a difference in the HD discs, but if I've already got a good SE version, I may be gaining nothing and in many cases losing something by "upgrading". I picked up BD of Pearl Harbor then saw it was just the PG13 version. I already have the 4 disc SE with DTS and the longer R rated cut which I preferred. ID4, Die Hard 4, Pearl Harbor, the list gets longer for inferior versions coming to Hi Def. I have way too many movies and way too limited an income to "upgrade" everything they throw at me. I have a nice 5* version which will hold me over.

Here's my opinion...

Fox and the other studios that do this are screwing themselves more than us with this kind of tactic. I really don't think it's just so they can sell us the movie again, I think it's that they don't have to sell as many copies and still make a hefty profit if they don't spend the extra dough on fancy authoring, a second disc, a BD-50, or whatever. The reason I say they're screwing themselves is that it blows the whole "Blu-ray is better" thing right out of the water. Joe Six-Pack isn't gonna understand that hi-def footage takes up tons more space... he'll just see a DVD with lots of bonus material and a Blu-ray with just the movie, and wonder why the format that's supposed to hold six times more data only has the movie.

Of course Joe Six-Pack is usually only interested in the movie, so maybe I'm wrong there. It certainly doesn't offer much of an incentive to upgrade when the "better" version has less to offer. PQ can only go so far. I was disappointed to find out the BD had neither the extended cut nor bonus material, but I'm kind of getting used to that. I'm looking at Blu-ray kind of like Sony's Superbit discs... they don't replace the regular version, it's just a nice picture and better sound. There's enough of a difference with Blu-ray for me to justify buying them even though the old DVD has more bonus stuff.

What will probably really happen is that Blu-ray will become the next Laserdisc. LD and VHS coexisted for a long time... people who were really serious about movies bought the LD, but it didn't mean VHS was dead. Back then of course, it was the LD that had more bonus material AND better PQ, so this is a little different. I still think Blu-ray can hang on against standard DVD just because there's so much difference between SD and HD. I only have a 720p TV, but Blu-ray still looks slightly better. ID4 is a pretty grainy movie, but I'll take film grain over macroblocking any day.

I'm not necessarily betting on Blu-ray for the long haul, but if it ever dies, my discs will still work, and they'll still be hi-def. There have been enough players made that I should always be able to find one, and they don't have to phone home like DIVX players did, so they won't become doorstops like DIVX players are now. Speaking of DIVX, it worries me that Profile 2.0 is apparently a largely online thing... stuff like DIVX, WebTV, and lots of other online-dependent things didn't have a bright future when standards changed. For that reason, I'm happy with my non-Ethernet BDP-S300.

Enough catalog titles are coming out that haven't been on a hi-def format yet (movies that used to be exclusive to HD-DVD don't impress me since the transfer is already done), so the studios are obviously putting some effort into Blu-ray (erm... except Fox). To me that means by the time the format dies, we should have BD-ROM drives in computers, cheaper set-top units, and probably even portable players. I wouldn't care if it all came to an end, as long as I could still play the movies I have.

Don't get me wrong though, if a new hi-def format emerged and killed Blu-ray, I'm sure I'd eventually switch over and if I could re-buy all the movies on a new format that I had on Blu-ray, I'd do it (guess I'm one of the dumb sheep the studios and hardware manufacturers count on), but I'd have to keep any discs that had stuff the new format didn't offer, which is what I'm doing with my DVDs. The main disappointment of ID4 is that it doesn't completely replace my Five-Star DVD set, and it was disappointing that I, Robot didn't include the featurette from the standard DVD release, but the important thing is getting the movie in high-def.

It's also a space issue for me... every DVD I can replace with a BD, even if it's only Disc 1 like with ICE AGE, the better. I'll always have DVDs that a Blu-ray release will never make obsolete, just like I have Laserdiscs, VHS and Beta tapes that no DVD release has made obsolete. As long as that remains the case, I'll replace stuff any time I can. I won't go without bonus features, but I don't want to miss out on high-def transfers either. Thankfully I'm not a fan of the Matrix films, so there really isn't a "killer app" movie that is only on HD-DVD, but there are at least a half-dozen titles on HD-DVD that it would bother me if they never made it to Blu-ray. I was pretty close to buying an HD-DVD player before the format war ended, but I decided against it. If I have to sacrifice hi-def transfers of Billy Madison, Ray, Fletch, etc., so be it.

All these people quoting $35 for blu-rays make me wonder where the hell they're shopping at.

No shit!


I am mad at Fox because they haven't released Alien yet. Shortly both piece of shit AVP movies will be released, yet no Alien (Nor Aliens for that matter.) WTF?

We got The Fly.
We got Predator (Within a month).

I can see Predator outselling Alien, but The Fly?

I don't care about extras, I got em on the Quad set. The only extras that I would EVER care about being in HD are deleted scenes. I don't want that fake ass Director's cut they came out with a few years ago. Just give me the original theatrical cut with high def audio.

Come on Fox, you released Alien on UMD and D-VHS for crying out loud. Give me my drug!!

Sadly, the leading seller of HD media is Best Buy, who sells almost all Fox titles at $34.99. They also have sticker prices of $34.99 on titles like Assassination of Jesse James, and others.

Not everyone buys movies from the internets; they go to places like Best Buy and Circuit City, both of which charge only a few bucks less than list price, plus tax.

The studios screwing up so bad pisses me off, bu tit also saves me money, since I refuse to double dip anything I can't get the version I want of. Anyone know wha tthe plans are for Commando next month? They just released the damn extended cut, so you'd think that'd be on the BD.

And why the hell does everyone cheer for the theatrical of ID4, but nobody seems to care about Payback? Paramount fucked us there. I want the theatrical cut of that in hi-def, and I want it bad. The director's cut was so different it's unreal. The syndicate boss isn't even played by the same person!!

But they are astute enough to use this forum, thus knowing that the prices are much cheaper elsewhere.