Richard Curtis' star-studded 2003 rom-com Love Actually will be getting a 20th Anniversary 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray on November 21.

Funny, irresistible, and heartwarming, Love Actually is the ultimate romantic comedy that follows eight couples whose lives intersect shortly before Christmas. From the makers of Bridget Jones's Diary and Notting Hill, this beloved film is headlined by an incredible roster of stars including Hugh Grant, Liam Neeson, Colin Firth, Laura Linney, Emma Thompson, Alan Rickman, Keira Knightley, Rowan Atkinson and more. Take a breathtaking tour of love's delightful twists and turns as you fall under the spell of Love Actually and share the laughs and charm again and again!

Love Actually - 20th Anniversary 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray 

The 4K UHD Blu-ray + Blu-ray + Digital combo pack will include a Dolby Atmos soundtrack and supplements include:

BONUS FEATURES: 

• Making LOVE ACTUALLY (NEW)

• Join Writer/Director Richard Curtis along the with cast and crew as they reflect on the making of the film and its legacy 20 years later.

• Deleted Scenes with Introductions by Richard Curtis

• The Music of LOVE ACTUALLY with Introductions by Richard Curtis

• The Storytellers

• A featurette exploring the film’s main storylines, featuring interviews with the cast discussing their characters and the major elements within each on-screen relationship.

• Kelly Clarkson “The Trouble with Love is” Music Video

• Billy Mack “Christmas is All Around” Music Video

• Feature Commentary with Director Richard Curtis and Actors Hugh Grant, Bill Nighy and Thomas Sangsters

Pre-orders should be available any day now and here is the full press release:

THE BELOVED HOLIDAY FAVORITE COMES HOME

FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER ON 4K ULTRA HD

LOVE ACTUALLY

20TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

YOURS TO OWN NOVEMBER 21, 2023 

FROM UNIVERSAL PICTURES HOME ENTERTAINMENT

INCLUDES BLU-RAY™ AND DIGITAL CODE

SYNOPSIS: Funny, irresistible, and heartwarming, Love Actually is the ultimate romantic comedy that follows eight couples whose lives intersect shortly before Christmas. From the makers of Bridget Jones's Diary and Notting Hill, this beloved film is headlined by an incredible roster of stars including Hugh Grant, Liam Neeson, Colin Firth, Laura Linney, Emma Thompson, Alan Rickman, Keira Knightley, Rowan Atkinson and more. Take a breathtaking tour of love's delightful twists and turns as you fall under the spell of Love Actually and share the laughs and charm again and again!

BONUS FEATURES: 

• Making LOVE ACTUALLY (NEW)

• Join Writer/Director Richard Curtis along the with cast and crew as they reflect on the making of the film and its legacy 20 years later.

• Deleted Scenes with Introductions by Richard Curtis

• The Music of LOVE ACTUALLY with Introductions by Richard Curtis

• The Storytellers

• A featurette exploring the film’s main storylines, featuring interviews with the cast discussing their characters and the major elements within each on-screen relationship.

• Kelly Clarkson “The Trouble with Love is” Music Video

• Billy Mack “Christmas is All Around” Music Video

• Feature Commentary with Director Richard Curtis and Actors Hugh Grant, Bill Nighy and Thomas Sangsters

Instagram: @uniallaccess

X: @UniAllAccess

Tiktok: @universalallaccess

LOVE ACTUALLY FILMMAKERS:

Cast: Alan Rickman, Bill Nighy, Colin Firth, Emma Thompson, Hugh Grant, Laura Linney, Liam Neeson, Martine McCutcheon, Rowan Atkinson

Casting By: Mary Selway CDG

Music By: Craig Armstrong 

Co-Producers: Debra Hayward, Liza Chasin 

Costume Designer: Joanna Johnston 

Line Producers: Chris Thompson 

Production Designer: Jim Clay 

Director of Photography: Michael Coulter BSC

Editor: Nick Moore 

Produced By: Duncan Kenworthy, Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner 

Written and Directed By: Richard Curtis 

LOVE ACTUALLY TECHNICAL INFORMATION 4K:

Street Date: November 21, 2023

Selection Number: 810134946309 (US)

Layers:  BD 66

Aspect Ratio: 16:9 2.39:1 Widescreen

Rating: R for Sexuality, Nudity and Language

Subtitles: English SDH and Latin American Spanish

Languages/Sound: English (Dolby Atmos for Feature and Dolby Digital 2.0 for Bonus Content) and Latin American Spanish (DTS Digital Surround 5.1)

Run Time: 02:14:52

ABOUT UNIVERSAL PICTURES HOME ENTERTAINMENT:

Universal Pictures Home Entertainment (UPHE – www.uphe.com) is a unit of Universal Filmed Entertainment Group (UFEG). UFEG produces, acquires, markets and distributes filmed entertainment worldwide in various media formats for theatrical, home entertainment, television and other distribution platforms, as well as consumer products, interactive gaming and live entertainment. The global division includes Universal Pictures, Focus Features, Universal Pictures Home Entertainment, Universal Brand Development, Fandango, DreamWorks Animation Film and Television.  UFEG is part of NBCUniversal, one of the world’s leading media and entertainment companies in the development, production and marketing of entertainment, news and information to a global audience.  NBCUniversal owns and operates a valuable portfolio of news and entertainment networks, a premier motion picture company, significant television production operations, a leading television stations group, world-renowned theme parks and a suite of leading Internet-based businesses. NBCUniversal is a subsidiary of Comcast Corporation.

here are our picks for the best 2017 4K Blu-rays that make the most of the HDR/WCG format and should be among your go-to demo discs.

Last week I sat down with the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) to get a quick update about how the new format is performing as well as to observe a quick side-by-side 4K vs HD demonstration.

Should apply to existing preorders.

This is my final 'Deadpool' post this week, I swear!

After getting some hands on time with the stunning 'Deadpool' Ultra HD Blu-ray (and the very strong Blu-ray) over the previous weekend, our friends at the Fox Innovation Lab invited journalists for a direct UHD vs HD demonstration. Unlike our previous demo, this time we were treated to consumer grade encodes as both the HD and UHD sources played on IDENTICAL Samsung Ultra HD displays.

Hashtag: Science!

For an in-depth understanding as to how this demo went, please check out the video portions of my Ultra HD Blu-ray and Blu-ray reviews.

The short version is this: the Ultra HD Blu-ray absolutely CRUSHES the Blu-ray in side-by-side comparisons. To be fair, this effect wanes slightly in A-to-B comparisons with any sort of time delay, so don't feel too bad if you haven't upgraded yet. But side-by-side? Shoot. This is the release the earlier adopters have been waiting for. The Ultra HD offers deeper black levels, more vivid colors (hello, red!), and oodles of added highlight and CGI detail. I was really impressed.

To help take us through what we were observing on the two displays, 'Deadpool' director, Tim Miller, as well as the film's colorist, Tim Stipan, lead a panel discussion moderated by Schawn Belston, EVP of Media and Library Services, Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, where they chatted about their post-production process, the benefits of HDR, and answered a few questions.

The entire panel is a little too long to transcribe here, so what I've done is broken down key information using direct quotes. Enjoy!

Our Demo Setup

Schawn Belstin: These are two identical monitors that have been calibrated to match each other. The content on one is HD, standard dynamic range, compressed the same way it is on the Blu-ray. And on the other monitor is the HDR 4K compressed the same way it is on the UHD disc.

Two Firsts for Fox Ultra HD Blu-ray

Schawn Belstin: This is our first disc that features all HDR content, so the menus and logos and everything are in HDR. Also, object-based audio. Dolby Atmos is on the entire disc. This might not seem like that big a deal, but trust me when I say it was. We had to re-imagine all of our technical work flows behind the scenes to make this actually possible. To give you an example, we spent two months rendering and re-rendering, trying to figure out the best way to render the Fox logo in 4K, in open EXR, to get the most out of this HDR experience, and that was just the logo. So you can imagine what goes into an entire movie. But you didn't come here to hear me talk about the logo so let's get to the movie.

Deadpool's Multiple DI Timeline

Tim Stipan: First we did the normal theatre pass, which is called P3 color space. Concurrently we also did two version of IMAX; we did a Xenon bulb and then we did a laser pass also. Then, actually, we did the Rec 709 HD pass. And then we did the HDR pass.

Tim Miller: Actually, so it's six if you count that, because then we did the Dolby [Vision] pass.

Tim Stipan: Oh, yeah, I almost forgot that. I felt like every time we were going through it we were seeing more and more and more. And the last pass that we did was the [UHD Blu-ray] HDR pass, which you are seeing here, and we were just like, "wow, gosh, we wish we had that at the beginning because you're not seeing so much detail in the skies and flames and Colossus and Deadpool's suit." Things of that nature. [HDR] allowed me to be better at my job because I could see more color information, I could match things better. By seeing all that extra color information and detail, I felt like I was doing a better job being a colorist. I felt a lot of shots now had this painterly quality to them, which I didn't quite notice as much when we were doing the normal theatrical color grade.

HDR First Impressions

Tim Miller: For a first-time filmmaker every time I walked into DI, I'd get to see it on a big screen, thinking to myself, "I made a movie, fuck yeah!" [laughter] And then for this last pass they brought me in and sat me down in front of a monitor and I'm like, "well I've done this before..." But then it started playing and I truly thought it was the best looking -- format and display medium aside -- it's the best looking version of the movie by far.

Tim Stipan: Yeah, the amount of detail you get in flames. You see so much more of actual flame. I wouldn't say [SDR] looked like a 2D image, but all of a sudden [with HDR] it has extra dimension to it, it's almost like 3D.

HDR Extra Detail

Tim Miller: Having done DIs for four different outputs, the Ultra HD is just fucking amazing at the level of detail. Especially since we did it at the end of the process. Especially the skies is where I noticed it most. In a lot of the shots, particularly on the freeway fight, there is just so much more detail. It's like suddenly the sky was not a white mass the way it had been in all the other formats. Also Deadpool's costume was the other big thing I noticed. It's got a really fine weave to it and, suddenly, all the detail in that costume comes out in a way that turns to mush in all the other formats. And VFX too. Explosions, fires, things like that, the fight in the lab looks particularly cool in this super high res format.

Tim Stipan: We're taking advantage of the camera. The camera captures this and now with HDR you're allowed to see what the camera's actually capturing.

HDR's Effect on Filmmaking

Tim Miller: We shot ['Deadpool' in] 3K on the Alexa. If we shot in 6K, which is the newer stuff, or I could have shot on the RED, how much better would this [Ultra HD Blu-ray with HDR / WCG] look there? Where [the Blu-ray] wouldn't benefit from the extra resolution, [the Ultra HD Blu-ray] would. So aside from all the other compositional benefits, from being able to fuck around with framing, I think we'll get a huge bump in the level of detail. But to answer your question, [HDR] would probably have a negative effect on the filmmaking process because suddenly I'd be less forgiving about all that shit I know were going to see in the background.

Tim Stipan: The thing I keep thinking about is the faces ... I think this happened when HD first came out is that people were all of a sudden saying, "we gotta put extra makeup on". That would be my only concern with HDR, but otherwise all the extra detail you're seeing is a huge benefit.

HDR vs CGI

Tim Miller: It could help or hurt depending on how good the CG is. If it didn't integrate well, it would excentuate ... and just more clearly illuminate where you fucked up.

HDR vs SDR Color Timing Differences

Tim Stipan: It was something that just happened. We saw [the big explosion during the film's climax] in HDR and there was more of a boldness, more detail to it. It's not that we didn't like what we did in the SDR version, but the HDR version looked great and we were like, "let's go with it." Could we have tweaked the SDR to get it closer to the HDR, yes, but it still wouldn't have the detail because there is a difference between the color of the flames.

Tim Miller: But don't you just have more range to work with [in HDR]? If you had gone after that in [SDR], it would have fucked up other things.

Tim Stipan: It's not something we were isolating. We didn't isolate the flames, but once we color corrected the image, they kinda fell into place.

Thanks again to the Fox Innovation Lab for the invite. It's great to know, outside of our home theatre geek circles, filmmakers are as excited about this new format's capabilities as we are. Because, at the end of the day, HDR means audiences are experiencing more of a film's production than ever before.

And for Heaven's sake, people, don't just sit there reading this, go check out the 'Deadpool' Ultra HD Blu-ray for yourselves... OR, if you're reading this on or before May 22, 2016, enter for a chance to WIN A FREE copy from your buds here at High-Def Digest.

Some exciting news on the display front, once again proving 2016 to be a very good year for considering a 4K Ultra High Definition upgrade.

Welcome to the Fox Innovation Lab, circa 2016.

We've done it! Our very own UBD-K8500 is in hand.  

Get hyped with the eye candy.

New 4K content is finally on its way to Samsung Ultra HD TVs. 

The company is set to release several new Ultra HD TV models for prices as low as $499. 

Two new 4K models are coming later this year. 

An extra-large 4K model and two new Ultra HD display series have been announced. 

For a limited time, Samsung is including eight free UHD movies with the purchase of select 4K TVs. 

New 55-inch and 65-inch models now join the company's already available 84-inch commercial grade UHD displays.

The upcoming 4K set is one of the most affordable models in its class.

Three new projectors have been detailed, including two 4K models.

The world's first THX-certified 4K display is now available.

The company has released a new video showing off its latest 4K and OLED TVs from the IFA trade show.

The company's UHD video download service is now live and two new 4K TV models have been released.