Audio Video News

Steven Spielberg has held out long enough. With as many as 12 million DVD players expected to be in movie fans' homes by the end of the year, Hollywood's most successful director has decided to release his films on digital discs.

The announcement, made late in April, mentions that a 25th-anniversary edition of Jaws, one of the biggest hits of 1975, and #13 in all-time box-office ticket sales, will be released July 11. E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial will appear later this year. The collector's edition of Jaws, with a choice of DTS or Dolby Digital soundtrack, will include outtakes, deleted scenes, a documentary short on sharks, and a feature on how the film was made. Some of the extra material is being lifted from the Universal laserdisc.

Despite its legendary box-office performance, Jaws sold only 800,000 copies on videotape—compared to millions of units of other Spielberg films—partly because it was released in 1980 during the very early days of video recorders, and partly because it hasn’t been available since 1996. Universal will treat the DVD release as a new event, according to studio head Craig Kornblau, who also said that the Jaws DVD will offer a new widescreen picture. A double-cassette VHS release is also being prepared.

For the past three years, Steven Spielberg has hesitated about DVD, waiting for the format to gain momentum among movie fans. Other Spielberg hits—like An American Tail, Jurassic Park, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Schindler's List—will be released on DVD on a staggered basis. The only hit film from Spielberg to be released so far on DVD is Saving Private Ryan. Paramount-controlled films such as the Indiana Jones series, on which Spielberg collaborated with George Lucas, have yet to be scheduled for DVD release. Lucas has reportedly made progress toward releasing them and his Star Wars films on DVD by sometime next year.