By Travis Johnson
In a recent interview, Rogue One director Gareth Edwards let slip that Disney has been beavering away on a new, 4K digital restoration of the original 1977 Star Wars, later subtitled Episode IV: A New Hope. What’s more, it looks great.
Edwards told Little White Lies that he watched it with ILM supervisor John Knoll. “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 – shit, we didn’t take any notes. You can’t watch it without getting carried away.”
Now, obviously Disney/Lucasfilm aren’t doing this for their health, so we can expect this thing to see the light of day sooner rather than later, and with 2017 being Star Wars‘ 40th anniversary, I would put cash money on an announcement in the not too distant future of a May 25th release date – that being the exact date the original film hit screens back in the day. Also keeping that in mind, I’d say there’s an exceedingly good chance that it’ll be the original version, not the Special Edition. Celebrating such an anniversary by showing us late ’90s CGI in 4K? That’d just be weird.
More details as they emerge, but we’re probably not wrong on this.
