CES: Warner Bros. Home Entertainment, Dolby Partner In Dolby Vision Distribution Deal

It’s been a year since Dolby introduced high dynamic range (HDR)-supported Dolby Vision, and now the company is arriving at CES with a Warner Bros. partnership aimed at jumpstarting the rollout with a slate of 4K titles mastered in the format. This will include Edge of Tomorrow, Into the Storm and The Lego Movie, scheduled for release in early 2015.

There’s a lot of HDR interest coming out of Hollywood—HDR effectively widens the range between the blackest blacks and whitest whites that a display can reproduce. Dolby Vision is intended to be a complete system, through which Hollywood would produce content in the format, and a delivery system would get that content to Dolby Vision supported TV.

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Jim Wuthrich, president, Americas, Warner Bros. Home Entertainment, said in a statement: “We’re eager to expand our partnership with Dolby to deliver a steady pipeline of Dolby Vision titles. By leveraging Dolby Vision to unlock artistic intent in a completely new way, we are able to provide home audiences around the world with dramatically enhanced picture quality that fully engages their senses and brings Warner Bros. movies to life in their living room.”

According to Monday’s announcement, Dolby and Warner Bros. are preparing the initial slate of titles “in time for the launch of Dolby Vision-enabled TVs, as well as a pipeline of additional catalog and new release titles throughout 2015.”

While the CES exhibition doesn’t open until Tuesday, at press time there had not been formal announcements of Dolby Vision-supported TVs, including at the press conference of Sharp, which a year ago showed a prototype Sharp display with Dolby Vision support. A Dolby spokesperson declined to comment on displays, saying TV announcements would come directly from the manufacturer(s). That might include Vizio, stay tuned.

On the cinema side, Dolby recently announced a plan to launch “Dolby Cinema,” a Dolby Vision-supported theatrical system that would compete with premium large formats systems such as Imax.

Dolby has already approached all of the Hollywood studios about creating content for the Dolby Vision format. While only a partnership with Warners was announced on Monday, sources have identified additional Dolby Vision-remastering projects, including Universal’s Oblivion and Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy.

Email: Carolyn.Giardina@THR.com
Twitter: @CGinLA

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