Disney doing catalogue physical media releases? Crikey. The Sixth Sense and Signs are both coming to 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray in the UK.
First announced in the US a week or two back, we’ve now got confirmation that two of writer/director M Night Shyamalan’s early hits – the juggernaut that became The Sixth Sense and crop circle tale Signs – are coming to the 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray format for the first time.
The films are earmarked for a 16th December 2024 release, and have gone up for preorder.
You can find the listing for The Sixth Sense here.
You can find the listing for Signs here.
What’s interesting here isn’t just that the films have been remastered for a fresh physical media release, and their first in 4K, it’s also that it might just be Disney loosening its grip a little more on its catalogue.
Disney has been – for obvious reasons, given that it has a streaming machine to feed – the poorest studio supporter of physical media over the past five years. More than that, it’s not even doing 4K remastering on many of the catalogue titles it owns and has acquired. That’s thousands of Fox films, and even something you’d think would be demanded in 4K, like the mighty Con Air.
The fact that The Sixth Sense and Signs are now arriving – the first standalone catalogue releases from Disney since the James Cameron films earlier this year (and then, before that, you have go to back to Michael Mann’s Heat in the middle of 2022) – is promising.
It’s also presumably the first fruits of a deal that saw Sony take over Disney’s physical media work in February of this year.
The hope then was that it’d unleash more catalogue titles from Disney, and while two films is hardly a flood of films, hopefully it’s the start of a whole lot more. Who knows? This time next year, George Of The Jungle may have the 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray release it very clearly deserves.
Signs and The Sixth Sense are now available to order. Our 4K calendar is here.
