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A RIDDICK BLU-RAY WISHLIST
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Noticed that Universal has not released any Riddick Blu-ray DVDs yet? I sure did. Considering how heavily they've leveraged TCOR for all existing formats so far (Four different SDVDs! HD DVD! UMD! Download! On Demand!) it struck me as very odd that they hadn't slammed out a BD version. This got me thinking... maybe there was still time to work up some kind of wishlist for special features, with the thought that Universal could be influenced to put out some new material rather than re-using all the original extras.
Well, I've pretty much given up hope of anyone considering this wishlist, which maybe could have been a possibility if I had written it a while back. It's not unheard of for the fan perspective to at least be given some cursory inspection. But I've gotten some information that leads me to believe that Universal was working on some sort of Blu-ray package months ago, which makes sense because they would want to have one out for the Holiday shopping season (and to crosspromote with Assault on Dark Athena). I very much hope they decided to do something different, rather than carry all the same material forward yet again. Despite the shiny new format and the whole "resell to the fanbase" approach, I would think there's got to be a point where you've put out enough versions of the same movie that buyer's fatigue sets in unless you give them (us) something different.
With that in mind, it's still a fun thought experiment. So here goes. I suspect it won't be long until we know how far off all of this ended up being, heh.
To begin with, my initial impulse was to say they should just mimic the Alien Quadrilogy. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized how unrealistic this idea was. First of all, it took a long time for the Quadrilogy to happen, and the first two Alien movies are considered some of the most important genre movies ever made. In addition, they were wildly successful financially. The Chronicles of Riddick, while fun and arguably possessing a strong following, is just not in this same league as Alien or Aliens. I do think another "Riddick Trilogy" package is a possibility, rather than individual disks for Pitch Black, TCOR, and Dark Fury. I just don't think it can realistically be as comprehensive as the Quad, so here's my plan for a budget-friendly Alien Quad "lite" with all the expensive calories removed.
The Movies
Pitch Black
Pretty straightforward; release the expanded "Director's Cut" as the new, official version. While the additions were small in scope, they added some very critical elements to the already strong characters without harming the pace. One in particular, the scene between Frye and Johns where he tells her about Riddick's knife tip in his back, establishes an important backstory element that I hope will be leveraged in the future (Riddick vs. Johns - something could be done with this concept!).
The Chronicles of Riddick
This also requires the "Director's Cut" to be included and to have the theatrical version be shunted aside, although the elements removed from the theatrical cut should be archived elsewhere on the disk.
Dark Fury
There is only one version of this as far as I know, and it seems sufficient as-is to me.
Escape from Butcher Bay Machinima
I'll probably never stop pushing on this, but I feel that EFBB was so strong that it could easily be edited into a long-form film version and be included in with the other movies. The character and voice work is  incredibly solid, the game visuals realistic and exceptional, and the story exciting. The best part about this idea is that a "movie" version of Escape from Butcher Bay *already exists*... One of the Starbreeze developers shot and edited it, and it's been on Tigon's website in low resolution for years now. All that's needed (well, besides untangling the credit and $$ issues that would surely come up) is to take the original likely-high-definition source files and convert them to the new format. This seems like a slam dunk from a marketing bullet point perspective, too.
The Extras
The Script
Twohy's scripts are great reads. Since he writes them from the perspective of a director already planning out the production, they tend to be more energetic than something carefully scrubbed by a screenwriter who knows to leave the details up to the eventual director. They're also interesting to read through and compare the original intention to what actually made it to the screen. We can guess from the novelization that some major sequences were changed (the original Planet UV Mercs, Toombs' death) or removed altogether (Riddick escaping from the Basilica).
Complete the Planet UV frankenscene
I loved the original Toombs death sequence that was put together for the DVD. I thought the whole idea of restoring a sequence, keeping whatever shots are needed in the form they were left in (animatic, photographic only, roughed-in effects, or complete), was cool as hell.
The existing Riddick DVDs show a portion of the original Planet UV scene, starting with Riddick and Toombs. But recent photos have surfaced that revealed they shot material for that sequence that occurs prior to Riddick and Toombs meeting, and at the very least made sets for other shots. I would like to see the whole shebang, start to finish, using whatever they have.
Deleted Material
 We know that principal photography captured at least two scenes that we've never seen more than stills of; Riddick using the ship tracker on Helion Prime, and him digging the Merc ship into the sand to hide it. It would be nice to have those in there too. And in an interview I conducted with David Twohy he mentioned that the editors removed 30 minutes of "air"... maybe there's something interesting in there? The original script is full of shorter scenes and shots that didn't make it into the final film, maybe for pacing or money reasons. No need to have those sit in a box in a warehouse forever. Toss 'em on.
Storyboards
One of the interesting things about TCOR is that Twohy didn't write the first script that Universal considered... David Hayter and Akiva Goldsman did. In this version, Kyra was a ridiculously oversexualized superkiller who wore a skintight black leather catsuit or some shit like that. While Twohy abandoned almost everything except the name, the storyboards that I've seen all show Kyra in that tight black catsuit and high-heeled boots. This makes me wonder what other kinds of things were kept in the boards from old scripts, and would be very illuminating when looking at the movie's journey to its final version on the screen from its origins inside someone's skull at Universal.
 
Vin Diesel commentary
He was an Executive Producer and played the main character... a franchise name was even cooked up for this character, for chrissakes! But no commentary! This is a huge loss; not only are his thoughts about creating Riddick of much interest and his participation in the production bound to be illuminating, he's also a very engaging participant in commentaries just in general. If this disk comes out with no Diesel participation, then I think it's fair to speculate that he was just asking too much money. Obviously Universal would do anything possible (short of screwing their financial projections for the SKU) to get such a big star on the disk, so unless there's some weird Jerry Perenchio/Ridley Scott thing (Blade Runner... if you're curious, send me an email) going on that so far hasn't been hinted at, then there's just no other reasonable explanation.
Commentaries from the other actors would be very welcome, also. Nick Chinlund & Keith David for sure. Judy Dench and Colm Feore might be too cool to come back, and Thandie Newton has publicly crapped on TCOR so to hell with her. Look, just get Vin Diesel and Chinlund and that would be enough.
Prop Photos
This was one of the features of the Aliens Quadrilogy that I loved, and would love to see replicated on the next Riddick set.. which shouldn't be too difficult, since hundreds of detailed Riddick prop photos already exist. The Propstore of London, who apparently bought a large mountain of stuff from the production and has been selling the items for years, have posted many closeup photos of everything from costumes to weapons to tequila bottles. This would be a simple matter of a phone call and an FTP upload, and then the BD designers would have all of this in hand.
Into Pitch Black
I think it's time to put this thing in an official, easy-to-find format so the fans won't have to keep scraping and searching. Sure it's lo-fi and contradicted by stuff that appeared later on, but it still holds an important place in the franchise's history and does provide some fun expansion of concepts in PITCH BLACK.
I don't want to watch this thing on shitty YouTube anymore, I want it on my bigass TV!
Comprehensive FX documentaries
I suppose one option would be to just pull in the documentaries on the Dark Fury DVD, along with the website material, the SciFi Riddick special, and the docs on the Best Buy promo DVD. Some of those are pretty good. But I'm guessing that much more of the development of this film was shot, so why not put *all* that stuff to use finally? That material was filmed during production specifically for the purpose of being extra content, so why not release all of it? An unthinkable amount of work went into these movies and it would be unfortunate to let all that creativity and effort go to waste. I would like to see the modellers, the set fabricators, the concept artists, the costumers, the prop makers, stunt coordinators, the CGI team, everyone.
Material from the film's Publicity
 I was pleased back in the day at the comprehensive marketing that the movie got; Uni really seemed to make a valiant (and expensive) effort. So this would be a great place to archive all of that... the first unique teaser trailer, the first big regular trailer, all the TV spots (interesting especially for including footage that never made it into the film until the DVD), closeups of details on the extremely fantastic main US poster along with the very cool international posters and the early "Pitch Black 2" posters, lobby cards, and whatever else was put out there that I don't know about.
Assault on Dark Athena
In General
There is a lot of interest in the title with all the big media outlets, so this is probably the best crosspromotional opportunity this franchise is going to get for a long time. Promoting Butcher Bay was a big element of the original Riddick DVDs, so this seems like a perfect chance to do the same.
Now, in a perfect world the disk would contain a playable demo as the TCOR disk did, but that's a bit complicated... how many people actually have Blu-ray drives in their computers yet? There's no BD drive for the Xbox360 either. I suppose you could assume that the demo could only be for Playstation 3 owners, as horrible as that would be. Maybe the package could contain a separate Dark Athena SDVD disk.
But putting aside the idea of a demo, there are still plenty of things that could be included. We haven't seen anything from DA yet, really, so at the very least a big new trailer and screenshots would be a must. There should be several dozen different galleries packed with high-res wallpapers, icons, desktop themes, as well as bunch of Starbreeze-style developers' movies showing different aspects of game play. And hell, release a coupon for Dark Athena with 2008's Riddick Blu-ray disk and then release a coupon for the Blu-ray with Dark Athena when it comes out in '09. Sit back and watch the money roll in!
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