Warner Bros has released a bunch of new Blu-rays covering legacy titles (don’t worry, new titles are coming too: Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince will be available on Blu-ray from 18 November, and The Hangover from 25 November).
Amongst them are the Mel Gibson movie Payback, and the Oliver Stone classic, Natural Born Killers. Payback is provided in two versions: the original 1999 theatrical release, and the 2006 Director’s Cut. This is a rare DC, being significantly shorter than the original, and apparently much darker. Both are on the one disc, and are so different to each other than they are entirely different encodes, rather than having seamless branching employed to stitch together the two versions (aside from anything else, their colour palettes are very different).
As it happens, Natural Born Killers was released on Blu-ray several months ago, so the new one is actually the Director’s Cut, and is several minutes longer. The box is headed ‘Original Uncut Version’. The changes are outlined here.
These, also, are very different encodes, for reasons which aren’t clear. I used BDInfo 0.5.2 and 0.5.3 to capture video bitrate graphs from the two versions and placed the graphs on the same scale as an animation. You are getting a lot more bits in the original release. It will be interesting to see if there are any visible differences in the picture quality.
