The 1997 favourite Con Air has got a new 4K remaster, and director Simon West suggests a fresh 4K release is coming soon.
It’s no secret that Disney hasn’t been the finest archivist of many of its 1990s favourites, only now getting around to 4K remasters of a bunch of box office hits. Catalogue stuff outside of the blockbusters is struggling to get too much of a look in, unless James Cameron happened to direct it.
Still, signs of life. Disney inked a deal a little while back with Sony, for the latter to handle its disc output. Then, earlier this year, The Digital Bits website confirmed that a 4K upgrade of the much-loved Con Air – one part of the unofficial Nicolas Cage action trilogy – was now available on iTunes.
The director of Con Air is Simon West, and he’s got a new movie on the way. It’s called Old Guy, and has Christoph Waltz in the lead role. As part of the promotion for that, he’s been doing an Ask Me Anything session on Reddit, and the question of a Con Air 4K disc came up right from the off.
Simon West confirmed that he’d been involved last year in doing work on the film. “Last year we actually did a 4K upgrade of Con Air”, he wrote.
“We went back to the original negative, we remixed the sound, and colour-corrected it, so that’s in the works, there should be a 4K release coming soon.”
Presumably, that work is also what’s now available in the iTunes version of the film, but while there’s not been confirmation of a fresh physical media release, it’s looking a little more likely. Not unrelated, a 4K remaster of Michael Bay’s Armageddon, another Disney release, has also been completed. The Rock is another obvious candidate from the same era, and the hope and expectation now is that Disney, via Sony, gets these titles moving. Money hasn’t been spent on a 4K remaster for no reason.
