News: Star Wars Heads to Blu-ray

There’s been a steady feed of scrubbed-up re-releases for Blu-ray over the last couple of years, with most classic films making their way onto the high definition format –  bar one glaring omission: Star Wars. It seems, however that the long, long wait for a hi-def Star Wars is finally over, with George Lucas announcing that the trilogy’s Blu-ray release isn’t far, far away.

Lucas told the New York Times he’d been waiting to be sure that the Blu-ray format would be widely adopted before gambling on a hi-def release.

All six live-action Star Wars flicks are due for release early in 2001, from The Phantom Menace to The Return of the Jedi. Unfortunately for Star Wars purists, the series will include the special edition films from 1997 which were digitally restored for the 2004 standard-definition DVD box.

“You have to go through and do a whole restoration on it, and you have to do that digitally,” Lucas told the New York Times. “It’s a very, very expensive process to do it. So when we did the transfer to digital, we only transferred really the upgraded version.”