HD DVD’s End Days for Paramount, too, but not Dreamworks
In perhaps two more movie titles that may be apt for the occasion, this week (March 5) Paramount issued “Things We Lost in the Fire” and “Into the Wild” in HD DVD as its final packaged content in that format. Paramount, along with Dreamworks SKG, backed HD DVD exclusively in a deal announced late last summer. At the time, there was much speculation on various consumer technology Web sites that the move would prolong the next-gen disc war well into 2008. While that didn’t happen, it did give Toshiba and other HD DVD proponents some breathing room, at least until it all began to unravel in the first week of 2008, just prior to CES.
While Dreamworks has not yet said publicly it will switch over to Blu-ray Disc (perhaps as part of its current arrangement with Toshiba), the studio’s chief executive, Jeffrey Katzenberg, has indicated that Dreamworks would continue to issue its titles on HD DVD until told otherwise. (But in the long run, of course, it has little choice if it wants to continue issuing HD discs.) Katzenberg told Reuters, “We have a partnership with Toshiba and have an obligation to see this through.”
