When Movie Remastering Goes Too Far

Here's a textbook example of how not to restore a movie. On the left, a frame from the original Predator, released in 1987. On the right, the same from Fox's forthcoming Predator: Ultimate Hunter Edition, starring bizarro, wax-figure Arnold Schwarzenegger.


All blow'd up like this, you might think the frame on the right looks great—it's so silky smooth!—but you'd be wrong. As the Digital Bits points out, with screenshots provided by HighDefDiscNews and Blu-Ray Stats.com, the new edition digitally scrubs away all of the original film grain and all of the Schwarzenegger's humanity along with it.

As we've seen time and time again, it's easy to go overboard with this sort of thing. But this is a perfect example of what you're left with when you wage war on original film grain: some sort of freakish Madame Tussuad's version of the original.