Colorized Version
Anyone think they'll ever release a fully colorized version like they do with the 3 stooges an Shirley Temple type stuff
Gamesystems never become obsolete if they are still fun to play
Anyone think they'll ever release a fully colorized version like they do with the 3 stooges an Shirley Temple type stuff
Gamesystems never become obsolete if they are still fun to play
I would be surprised if anyone made a colorized version any time in the foreseeable future, and here's why.
Colorizing a feature length movie (and Metropolis is a longer than average one; much longer than Shirley Temple movies, not to mention Three Stooges shorts) costs a fair amount of money. Nobody is going to pay for that unless they think that it will increase their sales by a wide enough margin to make that additional investment profitable.
So how many sales could they get for a colorized version that they would not have gotten for the non-colorized version? Typically the vast majority of those additional sales of colorized movies are to people who are resistant to watching movies that don't fit in to what they're used to. However, even a colorized version of a silent film (or a B&W subtitled foreign language movie, for that matter) would still be outside the comfort zone of those people, and so not many of them are going to buy / rent it regardless of whether it had been colorized or not. I mean, it's not as if the few actual color silent movies, for example The Black Pirate, sell a lot better than other silent movies. (And when it comes to the infrequent TV airings, when talking about silents it's worth remembering that a fair number of "old movie buffs" will specifically refuse to watch colorized versions of movies. For a silent, that's your primary audience.)
So why would anybody invest the money to colorize a long silent such as Metropolis?
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i just saw a "color tinted" version of metropolis at newbury comics. i went it to see if they had the original, im only interested in the original so i didnt buy the color version.
shareWhen the phrase "color tinted" is applied to a silent movie, it generally means something quite different than "colorized".
It was a fairly common practice at the time to tint movies on a scene by scene basis. This looked a bit like what you would expect now if a scene was shot through a color filter. So, instead of a scene being all shades of grey, it might be all shades of blue, for example. The kind of thing that you might see would be something like having all night time outdoor scenes tinted blue, outdoor daytime scenes tinted a warmer gold, and all indoor scenes (which conceptually would be expected to have artificial light) tinted orange. Maybe a scene that takes place in a burning building might be tinted red.
The simple answer is: No time soon. The film is currently safe in the hands of the F.W. Murnau Foundation, whose principal mandate is to preserve films, not to alter them. The current copyright is protected by an international court. Expensive and time-consuming, colorization would never be undertaken by a company that had to first negotiate the rights, unless they saw some kind of obscene profit from the result. I don't think a colorized version of the film would sell any better than the current, 2010 version.
shareTinting a film doesn't really alter the film in any major way.
shareI think the 80s Giorgio Moroder version is probably close as were gonna get
Gamesystems never become obsolete if they are still fun to play
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thats the 80s version with like the rock soundtrack its 1h 22m long
Gamesystems never become obsolete if they are still fun to play
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yeah its a pretty interesting movie, I might watch the 80s version outside projected on the side of the house tonight
Gamesystems never become obsolete if they are still fun to play
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With the recent advances in technology it is certainly possible to make a good colourised version relatively cheaply.
I myself don’t think for this particular movie it would add to my viewing pleasure.
I can see there being some kind of remastered and/or colorized version made for 2027, to celebrate the film's 100th anniversary. I can also see that version getting some kind of theatrical run.
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