Avatar fans be informed about Earth Day

You have seen the movie, pos­si­bly mul­ti­ple times and you just can­not wait to own it at home. Well, hard­core fans prob­a­bly will want to wait. This is not in any­way bash­ing the film or try­ing to dimin­ish its appeal (as if that were pos­si­ble). I sim­ply want con­sumers to be aware of what they could be run­ning out to get on Earth Day, Thurs­day April 22. If you are a big videophile who has to know all the lit­tle secrets about how your movie was made than this is with­out adoubt not the Avatar blu-ray or DVD for you to buy. There will be one and only one ver­sion of this movie com­ing out on Thurs­day and the only rea­son it has two discs is because one is the blu-ray ver­sion and the other is the DVD.

On either disc, what you will get is Avatar the motion pic­ture and noth­ing more. Menus, trail­ers, pro­mos, Easter eggs and any other extras that you might expect are being excluded with the hope of pre­sent­ing you with the absolute best pic­ture pos­si­ble. If you are won­der­ing, this disc will not be pre­sented in 3D either. There will be an ulti­mate edi­tion with how­ever many discs and all the stuff you want com­ing out for the hol­i­days. It will prob­a­bly even have Avatar fig­ures or what­ever to make col­lec­tors go nuts.

Now I can fully appre­ci­ate max­i­miz­ing the disc to give you the best pic­ture and sound. Even being a detrac­tor of the film, I will prob­a­bly bor­row this disc from some­one to see just how beau­ti­ful it looks on my TV. My beef is that while this is how every movie should be treated when com­ing to home video, why in the world were the extras excluded. A blu-ray holds 25GB of data. It is very com­mon­place to put movies on dou­ble den­sity discs that hold 50GB and it is pos­si­ble to have a sin­gle blu-ray with 100GB of stor­age, pos­si­bly more. Use one disc to give us amaz­ing visu­als and sound and make it a multi-disc pack­age with all the extras. A large major­ity of the peo­ple who buy this on Thurs­day are going to be the same peo­ple that buy the super duper ver­sion later this year. It’s this type of spend­ing that makes com­pa­nies think they can bend us over like this. Think about it: you paid $15 to see it in 3D in the the­atres; you are going to pay min­i­mum $19.99 on Thurs­day for a non-3D home ver­sion with no extras (prob­a­bly not even the “sex scene” that peo­ple have been look­ing for) and then you will pay any­where from $25–35 for this full ver­sion later this year. We have to draw a line some­where. It is great to sup­port some­thing you love, but don’t do it when the love is not being returned.

Bot­tom line: while I know it will not hap­pen, I think peo­ple should hold on to their money until the “full” release of Avatar is in stores later this year.

Handel

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