The Jack Ryan Collection courtesy Paramount Home Entertainment
Last summer, fans of the movies based on Tom Clancy's popular books were thrilled to hear that Paramount Home Entertainment was announcing new cinema-quality high definition releases of all four films in The Jack Ryan Collection. These Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD sets would include Sean Connery and Alec Baldwin in The Hunt for Red October, Harrison Ford in Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger, and Ben Affleck with Morgan Freeman in The Sum of All Fears. The releases were all to be the "Special Collector's Edition" versions, incorporating all the bonus material found on the similarly titled DVDs... but with 1080p quality video!
People, myself included, were excited, and this was certainly high on most want lists. The release date for versions in both formats was going to be Sept. 25th. But then, in August, Paramount announced that they would no longer support the Blu-ray format, and that effective immediately all future hi-def releases would be HD DVD only. A "BD" version of The Jack Ryan Collection, rumored to already be pressed and ready to go, was taken off the studio's schedule and pre-orders were canceled by the retailers.
Then, amazingly, the HD DVD version was delayed for a bit, from Sept. 25 to October 23rd. No problem, though, in meeting the new schedule; consumers started finding copies at some retailers as early as a week prior to that official street date. It caused a huge explosion, though, when folks realized that the HD DVD box — clearly labeled as being a "Special Collector's Edition", didn't have ANY of the extras. At all. Each disc in the set only contained the movie.
Paramount quickly moved to pull the title, recalling copies from retailers due to this mistake. Various websites theorized that the Blu-ray discs, which can hold up to 50GB of date (compared to 30GB on the largest capacity retail-sold HD DVD discs), were possibly able to hold the supplements but that the HD DVDs could not. The question was on everyone's mind: Would the problem be solved by adding the extras back onto the discs, or would the box simply be changed to take off the labels indicating special material? Paramount would not comment on that; they only said the error would be fixed and the product re-released in the future. Many people, myself included, picked up copies of the existing version at stores which didn't perform the recall... just in case.
This morning, though, The Jack Ryan Collection on HD DVD was re-announced by Paramount Home Entertainment. The new street date is March 25th, and the package art for the new set was delivered by the studio, along with the date. It seems that the new art answers the question: all mentions of these films being "Special Collector's Edition" versions are removed from the new packaging!
Will a Jack Ryan release in hi-def with bonus material ever happen (in any format)? Right now, any such action is being kept... top secret. We might need a super-spy to pry it out of them, but Ryan's not available for a while. In the meantime, if you just want to enjoy the films and have access to an HD DVD player, then put March 25th on your calendar, OK? — David Lambert
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