A Titanic Announcement
By Thomas J. Norton April 10, 2005 — It's no secret that the original DVD release of Titanic—about a zillion years ago in DVD time—was a technical dud. Oh, it looked okay, and the excitement of actually being able to put it on your very own shelf to watch whenever you wanted kept the disappointment to a low simmer. But it was released during the period when studios were just beginning to adopt the anamorphic or "enhanced for widescreen" format. Unfortunately, Titanic was not a beneficiary of that superior technology. As ordinary letterbox transfers go, it was among the better ones. But it wasn't what it should have been.

Finally, just as we're on the cusp of a high-definition format on 5-inch optical discs, Titanic is coming to DVD in new two-disc and four-disc sets. It will undergo a new high-definition transfer and be mastered onto DVD in anamorphic mode. It will offer the option of watching close to an hour of extra footage via seamless branching, and it will include tons of extras (on the four-disc version). To give you time to work up a buying frenzy, Paramount plans to release both versions this coming October.