Warner Botches Appleseed Packaging

Date: Monday, February 25, 2008

The Warner Home Video release of Appleseed: Ex Machina has been problematic in the last week or so due to poor solicitation information and now poor packaging. When the press releases came out last week, different sites had different information than what was on the PDF solicitation. The most notable was the lack of Japanese language options on these sites such as High Def Digest. The PDF solicitation only listed audio and subtitle options for the DVD and the impression given was that it would be the same on all other media (double disc set, Blu-ray and HD DVD). Yet for some reason sites were listing it without the Japanese language option and causing quite the stir.

We received our Blu-ray review copy from Warner today and we're very happy to say that it does include the Japanese language track as we expected it to from the solicitation information. What was surprising was that the packaging lists it as Japanese stereo. The Japanese release is being done on DVD and HD DVD only and they're getting 5.1 releases for it. Apparently this is yet another misprint on a Warner release as the Japanese track is actually a Dolby Digital 5.1 track at 640kbps. The menu option lists Japanese language - in Japanese only - but if you have your player set to pick Japanese as a default you'll be good.