Alright, let me say up front that I ripped that title from the new guy, David Vaughn. But I share David's opinion that this Tuesday is a very significant day of choice that could bear a surprising impact on the format war. This Tuesday The Matrix trilogy will be released on HD DVD, while the first two Pirates of the Caribbean movies hit Blu-ray (exclusively) just ahead of the third installment in that series hitting theaters.

While Warner is releasing The Matrix trilogy on HD DVD, that exclusivity figures to be finite as Warner also supports Blu-ray. However, even though it's been a big seller on HD DVD, Batman Begins hasn't yet reached Blu-ray for the same reason The Matrix is hitting HD DVD first- the advanced, picture-in-picture interactivity features on these discs apparently can't yet be duplciated on Blu-ray, and even if they were it's unclear if any current Blu-ray players could play them.

This battle between huge catalog hits comes at an important time. Blu-ray has been nailing sales milestones left and right, and by all accounts has been outselling HD DVD by better than 2:1 throughout this year. In June Sony will have a $599 Blu-ray standalone player in stores, and of course the PS3 is still out there. Nearly 100K PS3s were sold in April. While that's a small number in the gaming console war, that's a big number for Blu-ray players.

Cheap Chinese HD DVD players are supposed to hit the market later this year, but aren't targeted to arrive until fall. If HD DVD is going to have any momentum in the software market when those players arrive, The Matrix is going to have to win, big-time. As impressive as Universal's catalog output is, this is an A-list franchise.

And Toshiba is seizing the initiative with aggressive promotions. Starting May 20th, anyone who buys an HD-A2 player gets an instant in-store rebate for $100, taking a Toshiba HD DVD player to the magic $299 price point for the first time. For the final week of that promotion, June 10th-16th, the $100 rebate will be extended to any Toshiba HD DVD player.

So, The Matrix needs to deliver and here I wonder if Warner hasn't made a mistake selling only as a complete franchise in two versions. Amazon pre-order prices on the two separate versions are $63.95 for the The Complete Matrix Trilogy and $73.95 for The Ultimate Matrix Trilogy. It's not a secret that the first Matrix sequel is watchable, while the third installment is incomprehensibly bad.

The Pirates movies are $23.95 each at Amazon, and avaialble separately, allowing those who didn't like the bigger but not necessarily better sequel to opt out of the second half. And of course, behind Pirates the first Pixar title, Cars is still on the way this summer too. It will be interesting to see if Neo can hold the fort until this fall's HD DVD player reinforcements arrive.