Dear Friends,

As I’m sure you are aware, the October 30^th DVD/Blu-ray release of “Spider-Man 3” is tomorrow!  With the days on the calendar flying by, I wanted to take a quick moment in order to give you my personal highlights of the release. 

First off, and it’s a big one, is the release of not only “Spider-Man 3” on Blu-ray, but “Spider-Man” and “Spider-Man 2” as well.  A couple weeks ago I had the privilege of seeing a Blu-ray demonstration in which the three Spider-Man films were featured.  Being in Spidey 3 world these past two-and-a-half years, I really hadn’t had the opportunity to get educated regarding the benefits of Blu-ray, but the presentation really opened my eyes and I was impressed by the degree to which Blu-ray advances the experience.   The picture quality, with the extra disc space available via Blu-ray, was as impressive as it gets and Sam Raimi and editor Bob Murawski’s painstaking transfers of all three movies is readily apparent.

In terms of content, I’m extremely excited about the featurettes found on disc two.  We’ve had informative and entertaining featurettes in the past, but what sets the current crop apart from the other presentations are the materials that were captured on and off the set.  Off the set, we invited Vic Davis, our EPK producer, and his crew to numerous pre-production meetings.  On the set, for the first time we made Vic and his team members of our crew.  While filming “Spider-Man” and “Spider-Man 2”, Vic or his counterparts would have to call me and ask permission to shoot on a particular day.  Not so on “Spider-Man 3”.  Vic and company were issued ID badges and given carte blanche.  Whatever they needed to film, within reason, they were given access to.  The result is a gallery of featurettes that really pull back the curtain on the making of “Spider-Man 3” and in turn gives the viewer a front row seat to the pre-production, production and post-production process like never before on one of our films. 

Content-wise, I’m also really thrilled with the audio commentary with Sam and cast members Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, James Franco, Thomas Haden Church, Topher Grace and Bryce Dallas Howard.  This is by far the biggest cast commentary offering that we have presented on any of the Spidey DVD’s and to get their take on filmmaking, along with Sam’s, as well as their personal journeys during the movie-making process is very enlightening.

The rest of the DVD added value items are equally entertaining.  There are hilarious bloopers, photo galleries, videos, a commentary with producers Laura Ziskin, Avi Arad, editor Bob Murawski, visual effects supervisor Scott Stokdyk and me, and many more interesting features.  Additionally, as Sony has done in the past, we have included a 2 channel stereo mix supervised by Sam and Bob.  Although these mixes are getting rarer and rarer to find in a 5.1 world, we’re always happy to make this sound option available to the viewer.  This way, if you don’t have surround sound, you still have an audio option that matches your output so you don’t constantly have to ride the volume button on your remote, essentially re-mixing the movie yourself – Sam and Bob have already done that for you. 

Enjoy!

Grant Curtis

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