It looks like director George Lucas has his own Rebel Alliance on his hands. A team of Star Wars fans known as Team Negative1 have leaked an HD version of 1977's first franchise film, A New Hope, online — without the consent of Lucas, his company Lucasfilm or its parent company Disney.
Known as the "Silver Screen Theatrical Version," Team Negative1's edit of the movie "spent thousands of dollars and years of effort to restore to a faded print of Star Wars to the best-seen-yet high-definition version of the original cut of the film," as reported by Entertainment Weekly. The movie was first leaked online in Jan. 2016, and was then followed by an interview with one of the Internet group's main forces behind A New Hope's restoration, published on Feb. 17.
The impetus of the Silver Screen project? According to the Negative1 leader, it had to do with a subset of fans' predilection for original grit instead of high quality sheen.
"We know that anyone under 30 kind of prefers the clean, sharp, detailed look," the anonymous source stated. "Then the older crowd, the retro crowd, is like, 'give me the grain and give me the matte boxes and give me a little weave in the picture.' It's kind of like CD vs. vinyl."
The OG Star Wars director and creator is known in many respects as a pathological tweaker, adding modern elements, like CGI, to the first three entries, which were made years before these technological advents became available. If the fact that Lucas' myriad changes have warranted their own Wikipedia page isn't a sufficient enough indication, than it's hard to stay what else is.
In honor of George Lucas's birthday, tweak this line from Star Wars for our latest movie mad lib: "That’s no moon, it's a _____."
Posted by Crackle on Monday, May 14, 2012
Lucas has made a case of why he has refused to re-release a hi-def edit of the original 1977 film for over a decade.
"The special edition, that's the one I wanted out there. The other movie, it's on VHS, if anybody wants it," he stated in an interview in 2004. "I'm not going to spend the, we're talking millions of dollars here, the money and the time to refurbish that, because to me, it doesn't really exist anymore. It's like this is the movie I wanted it to be, and I'm sorry you saw half a completed film and fell in love with it."
As per EW, Lucasfilm did not comment on the leak.
Source: Movie Mezzanine
