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Comment by jb1991 | Hacker News Reader

jb1991

It's not just century-old movies, many much more recent movies which were available on DVD are almost impossible to find now that everything is to the whim of streamers and online services.

Here are some examples: https://johnaugust.com/2018/missing-movies

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> A more immediate way of getting some action would be to talk to some of the directors with films on the list and encourage them to get their movies released digitally. Ron Howard and James Cameron are obvious candidates.

Interesting side note: a couple of years back, I wanted to buy The Abyss on blu-ray. When I went to look, all I could find were DVD versions and a crappy fake blu-ray version where someone had just ripped a DVD and transferred it to blu-ray (seriously).

After a bit of digging, I came to find out that there is no blu-ray version of The Abyss because (basically) Cameron has been holding it up. I don't recall the exact details, but it has something to do with him wanting to oversee it personally, yet simultaneously never bothering to actually bother to get it done.

Looked again just now and supposedly the work has finally been done (?) and it was to be available last month, yet as of right now it's not available on amazon, so who knows..

I've been hoping for the 4K remaster to be finished and end up in theatres, hopefully as a nice director's cut and maybe even in an old school non-widescreen IMAX theatre. I remember 20 years ago being so excited to buy and watch a 4:3 DVD of The Abyss. It was right around the time that widescreen was equated to "good", but The Abyss was shot in 4:3 and it was a rare case where the widescreen version was the "pan and scan" version.

Highly recommend the documentary about shooting the film if you're a fan[1]. It's a film that could never be made in the same way today. The rat breathing an oxygen rich liquid scene was real (not saying this is a good thing) and the stuntwork of actors was even more dangerous.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YctOKgWVn9E

TIL The rat scene was real, thanks!

>everything is to the whim of streamers

Is it though? To me, it seems much more to the whim of the content owners. If they choose to not make it available to the streamers, then it's not the streamer's fault for not having it.

Except that the streamers don't take everything that is available... streaming has a cost to bear.

That's not the same thing. The article is talking about movies that are completely lost. No-one has a backup and no-one will ever see them again.

It's not the same thing, correct -- that is obvious, isn't it? But it is a related problem in the same vain.

To me, it was not obvious until I read the article in full. When I saw the 75% number I thought they only meant the original copy because surely there must exist some form of a copy in some archive somewhere, but I was wrong. There are no copies in existence whatsoever for these 75%, which is a mind-blowingly high number for me. If someone would have asked me I would have said maybe 1%.

I do agree that it's related and that it will likely lead to a similar outcome where new things get lost permanently.

Posted 5 years ago, and even the list of movies he cataloged is now gone - the Google sheet link is dead.

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