While I doubt you’ll see a big rush to colorize classic movies, I wonder if some of the studios would want to colorize movies like musicals?
Some of the movies are in the public domain, some are not. Heidi, The Miracle on 34th Street, The Mark of Zorro, and the Three Stooges shorts are still under copyright.
I see now that they have colorized some copyrighted films for other studios, but do not sell them themselves. Legend Films does sell a collection of the four public domain Three Stooges shorts, however.
Wow. I think it is very impressive.
I’ve got huge reservations about taking B&W films and adding colour, for similar reasons to those already mentioned. However, the sample on the Legend Films site was even worse…everything was in a brighter-than-bright glint. Fine when dancing around singing about new shoes, but the brief shot of the guy at the fireplace lost all its character once it was ‘enhanced’, and became an Ikea log cabin.
That shot stood out to me as really distracting, too. The mantle, especially, looked like it was made out of plastic or something. Too bright – too shiny. Like a model fireplace.
Same with everything else, really – except maybe not quite so obviously.
They did a fantastic job with the restoration. I liked that everything was nice and crisp, and how they fixed all the problems from the chemical degradation of the print – but it would look much better, to me, if they left the chroma out of it, and just did the same thing with a nice greyscale palette.
I don’t like looking at a scene and having all my attention drawn to things like “Wow, that’s a really yellow suit.”
Colorizing a b/w movie works best in high-key and outdoor sunlight scenes, where it can look almost like it was really shot in color. On the other hand, scenes with low-key lighting look bad. They just haven’t gotten the color de-saturization to look right.