David Fincher prepping Seven 4K, throws shade at Spielberg’s E.T. changes

Last Updated on June 22, 2023

David Fincher is revisiting one of his greatest films, 1995’s Seven, moving forward with a 4K restoration that he’s assuring fans won’t change anything in an outlandish way, citing the way Steven Spielberg (mis)handled E.T. in 2002. So, yes, you’re still getting Gwyneth Paltrow’s head in a box.

During an interview at the Tribeca Film Festival with Steven Soderbergh, David Fincher said that the 4K Seven upgrade will be a task that offers mild yet important issues. “You can fix, you know, three percent, five percent. If something’s egregious, it needs to be addressed…But, you know, I’m not gonna take all the guns out of people’s hands and replace them with flashlights,” which would be a terribly ineffective way to catch a serial killer. In fairness, Spielberg himself has expressed regret over that particular change, saying, “That was a mistake…I never should have done that. E.T. is a product of its era. No film should be revised based on the lenses we now are, either voluntarily, or being forced to peer through.”

So what will David Fincher be updating with Seven? “We’re going back and doing it in 4K from the original negative and we overscan it, oversample it, doing all of the due diligence and there’s a lot of shit that needs to be fixed…Because there’s a lot of stuff that we now can add because of high dynamic range. You know, streaming media is a very different thing than 35 mm motion picture negative in terms of what it can actually retain. So there are, you know, a lot of blown-out windows that we have to kind of go back and ghost in a little bit of cityscape out there.” If the process sounds daunting, it is. Even Soderbergh admitted he once had to leave the room and lie down after sitting through one of his coloring sessions. Wonder if AI could have done the job better…

A number of the changes David Fincher plans on making to Seven come from issues that many have never noticed, but those with serious setups would be able to point out. “On a 100-inch screen, you’ll look at it and go, ‘What the f*ck, they only had money for white cardboard out there?’ So that’s the kind of stuff on print stock, it just gets blown out of being there. And now you’re looking at it, going ‘I can see, you know, 500 nits of what the f*ck.’”

Unfortunately, David Fincher didn’t offer any details on the release of the 4K restoration of Seven, but hopefully fans can get a theatrical release…and a Criterion Collection release couldn’t hurt, either – after all, they did put it out on LaserDisc back in 1996.

What do you hope David Fincher does with the Seven 4K remaster? Let us know below!