Disney Is Sitting On A 4K Restoration Of The First ‘Star Wars’ And We Must Possess It

Star Wars stuff makes for great Christmas gifts, sure, but you know what Disney could do to belatedly make this holiday better? Release the 4K restoration of Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope which they totally have. (GIMME.) Rogue One director Gareth Edwards revealed as much in an interview with Little White Lies:

On day one, we were in Lucasfilm in San Francisco with Industrial Light and Magic and John [Knoll], our supervisor, he said that they’ve got a brand new 4K restoration print of A New Hope — it had literally just been finished. He suggested we sit and watch it. Obviously, I was up for that. Me, the writer, lots of the story people and John all sat down, we all had our little notepads, we were all ready for this. I’ll add that I’ve seen A New Hope hundreds of times. So I was sat there, ready to take notes and really delve under the surface of the film. You have the Fox fanfare, then scrolling text with ‘A long time ago…’, and then the main music begins. Next thing we knew it had ended, and we looked around to one another and just thought — sh*t, we didn’t take any notes. You can’t watch it without getting carried away. It’s really hard to get into an analytical filmmaker headspace with this film. It just turns you into a child.

He didn’t reveal if this is an internal copy or something Disney will eventually release (Fox has distribution rights to A New Hope, so they’d have to work together if so). Also, as /film points out, we don’t know if this is the theatrical version or the 1997 version George Lucas tinkered with, adding effects and making Greedo shoot first.

(Via Little White Lies and /film)

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