ScreenScribe

   Sunday night’s network movie premieres of Goosebumps and Grimsby fell flat against the umpteenth re-runs of The Lord of The Rings: The Two Towers and Die Hard 4.0. The kidult monster romp averaged 2.8% of TVNZ 2’s target audience, 18-49 year-olds, compared to Towers’ 3.7% on TVNZ 1 and House Rules’ 4.3% on Three. […]

The early reviews are in for The Zone’s NZ-filmed The Shannara Chronicles, which premieres 8.30 Wednesday — the same day as the US. “MTV tries — and fails — for a Game of Thrones all their own with this goofy, garish tale of warring elves and demons,” The Hollywood Reporter says of the 10-part series. […]

Warner Bros in the US today announced two Blu-ray editions of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey would go on sale in the US on March 19 and tipped an extended cut was in the works.  A NZ date has still to be confirmed for the theatrical Blu-ray but given the global roll-out of the movie, […]

The extended editions of the The Lord of the Rings movies will be released in a 15-disc Blu-ray collection in late June. Although distributor Roadshow Entertainment’s press release cites June 29 for NZ, this may change. Here are the edited highlights of the announcement: Following last year’s successful Blu-ray premiere of the original theatrical versions […]

Clash of the titans sums up this week’s competition for your Blu-ray dollars. Most distributors have key titles coming out in HD, from new blockbusters to back catalogue must-haves, that run the gamut of genres — from drama and documentary to fantasy and animation. A week after The Godfather trilogy went on sale in separate […]

Having released The Lord of the Rings movies separately on Blu-ray, Roadshow Entertainment is about to bundle the Peter Jackson Oscar-winners as an HD trilogy with extras. The release is scheduled for August 11 and will frustrate the Middle-earth faithful who snapped up the single releases without extras in April. Curiously, the reverse strategy was […]

Holy Hollywood Hype! Claims that Avatar notched up record-breaking Blu-ray sales in its first four days of release in North America have been KAPOWED! by a rival studio. Warner Bros has disputed 20th Century Fox’s assertion that its Batman hit, The Dark Knight, sold only 2.5 million copies on Blu-ray, compared to Avatar’s 2.7 million. […]

The Lord of the Rings movies bow on Blu-ray this week after overcoming mixed reviews in the US to top sales charts. Despite grumpiness about the movies being the theatrical cuts and not the extended editions, and the extras being standard definition from the original DVD releases, Peter Jackson’s Middle-earth phenomenon was the #1-selling Blu-ray […]

The Digital Bits has given the Blu-ray transfers of The Lord of the Rings trilogy high marks but not the “C+” extras, which have been directly ported over from the original DVD releases. The authoritative website awards the HD video of the theatrical cut of The Fellowship of the Rings 17.5 out of 20 and […]