We'd heard heard that Michael was a Blu-ray supporter and that he wasn't happy when he found out about Paramount's decision, but we didn't expect that he'd make that displeasure public so quickly. But there you go. FYI, his site has been understandably getting a lot of traffic this morning, so if you're trying to log in, you might want to be patient. Something tells me you're going to start seeing Michael Bay movies on Blu-ray from OTHER studios announced soon...
Speaking of Bay's reaction and Paramount's decision, it seems Michael wasn't alone. A lot of people have been e-mailing the studio in the last 24 hours as you can imagine. Some of the replies to those e-mails have been posted on various discussion forums around the Net. We don't want to get anyone in trouble over there, so we're not going to post the full text of any of them. But among the factoids that have been gleaned from these replies are:
1) All of the previously announced Blu-ray titles that had been completed and were being prepared for release have been cancelled. This includes Blades of Glory, NEXT, Face/Off, Top Gun and the Tom Clancy Collection. Indeed, we've checked the studio's press site and discovered that all of these titles, which had still been listed there for Blu-ray release as late as yesterday, have been removed from the site.
2) The terms of the deal with Microsoft SEEMS to be 18 months, however the deal contains "a lot of clauses which would allow us to release certain films on Blu-ray during this time period." In other words, the studio seems to be leaving itself plenty of wiggle room.
And here's the most interesting bit. This is taken from one of the actual e-mails...
3) "Actually we were as surprised as everyone else today when we found out about the agreement with HD-DVD. We found out when we arrived to work today and there had been no rumors at all circulating. I think it surprised us all because we have been working on Blu-ray versions of films such Blades, Face/Off, Top Gun, etc. through the end of last week. I can tell you we have received many calls today from various talent and certain directors voicing their displeasure with this decision. We even had VP's of other studios calling in from what I hear. I have never seen this type of atmosphere in the office."
In other words, Michael Bay probably wasn't alone among filmmakers that work with Paramount in being pissed off about this news. And it seems that the whole decision was concocted without telling ANYONE actually working on the discs. It was as much a surprise to the studio's employees as it was to the rest of the industry.
Here's another interesting story I've heard through the grapevine. People at Paramount who were working on the HD-DVD and Blu-ray Disc versions of Blades of Glory had actually been planning to do some kind of elaborate interactive feature on both versions... except that they discovered the 30GB HD-DVD disc didn't have enough space to do what they'd wanted to do. So they were planning to include this feature exclusively on the Blu-ray version. Now, of course, that's all changed. But this casts some doubt on comments made by Paramount's chief technology officer, Alan Bell, in the media since yesterday, to the effect that the studio considered HD-DVD the superior format from a technical standpoint. Apparently someone didn't tell that to the guys actually WORKING with these formats at the studio.
