With N.Y. Times reporter Brooks Barnes having drawn an analogy between John Carter‘s box-office crash and the great financial Ishtar disaster of 1987 (i.e., “Ishtar Lands on Mars“) and journos tweeting about Ishtar over the last day or so, it bears repeating that the Great Ishtar Bluray Delay saga, which I reported about last April, is still unresolved.
Most Los Angeles-based Sony Home Entertainment execs are away at an off-site meeting today, but Camilla Wilkinson, exec assistant to Sony Home Entertainment president David Bishop, has told me that the Ishtar Bluray is not currently on the SHE release schedule, which is firmed as far as May 2012 is concerned. So yes, a release could conceivably happen in the summer or fall of this year, but this has to be one of the strangest stalled-release situations in the history of the commercial Bluray market, absolutely and bar none.
Re-read what I wrote last April, but boil it all down and the likelihood is that the delay is due to some condition or stipulation or procedural hang-up having to do with Ishtar producer-star Warren Beatty, who is presumably still preparing his Howard Hughes movie for New Regency.
Two of the oddest aspects of the Ishtar Bluray saga are as follows: (a) the Bluray was released to at least one Toronto video store before the 1.14.11 release was abruptly cancelled a few days prior to that date, and (b) I know this for a fact because a Toronto-based HE reader bought a copy of the Ishtar Bluray off the shelf and sent it to me. I’ve got it right here, right now!
So it’s not confirmed and I’m not saying it’s likely, but it’s certainly possible that I, Jeffrey Wells, might be the only journalist residing on the North American continent who possesses a copy of the Ishtar Bluray as we speak. I just want to state this clearly so when some biographer or historian recounts this surreal saga, it’ll be understood that I may have been the only journalist to have owned a physical copy between January 2011 and March 2012, or at least to have reported about same.
