I think
these caps show a lack of headroom, and it does appear to be cropped from the original 2.55:1 (as IMDB claims the 'scope ratio to have been - there's also a telling title shot on the movie review page) rather than opening up the matte. BTW my question to Eureka was has this been cropped to 1.78:1 and the answer was in the affirmative. My second second question was why? No reply; of course, they may not actually know.
Eureka have removed any misleading information from the DVDs information page, and should be applauded for that, but I, personally am disturbed they have removed the reference to this being Universal's first Cinemascope film (without proper explanation as to what is on the disc and why) while that info is already out there in their
press release; I'd hope that at least an addendum will be sent out.
Distubing also that this is the best that Universal could source for Eureka.
I am indebted to Eureka's Kevin Lambert for going to extra mile to find out from Universal themselves just why we have what we have with TBSoF, and the news is not good:
I'm not sure if you are aware but Universal had a fire earlier this year and lost a huge amount of masters, it turns out that there was never a down conversion done from the HD 16X9 print before the fire, so nothing would exist to create one from at the original aspect ratio at the present time.
I've asked them to have a look at it and see if there is another copy anywhere else in the world but it looks doubtful.