Time Warner has been sending out the pink slips en masse to New Line Cinema employees this week. Only about one month ago, New Line was brought under the Warner umbrella. The layoffs began on Monday, and will cut about 450 employees off the rolls across both New York and Los Angeles offices. We're sad to see the cuts, and hang on to hopes that this will not have not a negative impact on the Lord of the Rings trilogy coming to Blu-ray. New Line isn't disappearing, and will be left with a small team for production, marketing, publicity and business affairs. [Disclosure: Engadget is part of the Time Warner family.]

We knew good and well New Line was following Warner out of Purpleville, but apparently, it plans on walking right into Warner Bros.' head office and calling it a career. Yep, New Line as we all know it is officially done, as a company memo has announced that it will soon "become a unit of Warner Bros." Reportedly, New Line will "maintain its own identity and will continue to produce, market, and distribute movies," but it will obviously do so under the Warner Bros. umbrella. The master plan is to enable what's left of New Line to "focus on the creative side of movie-making, while reducing costs and taking advantage of Warner Bros.' distribution systems." So long New Line -- it'll be a little weird without you (fully) around. [Disclosure: Engadget is part of the Time Warner family]

[Thanks, Perry]

We already knew that New Line Cinema (owned by Time Warner, which also owns Engadget's parent companies) and HBO Home Video would be following Warner into the land of the Blu, but it seems as if BBC Video (which also distributes through Warner) has yet to make a decision of its own. According to TVShowsOnDVD, The Beeb has reiterated that it will continue to support both HD DVD / Blu-ray for now and "will evaluate the marketplace before committing to one format." Apparently, Planet Earth has been moving quite well on the red front, and considering just how different its content is compared with New Line / HBO, we wouldn't be shocked to see it stick with both for awhile longer. Still, the cards are certainly stacked in BD's favor, but only time will tell if the BBC will continue to bleed purple.

As if anyone expected anything different, New Line confirmed with Variety Magazine that it'll follow Warner to the Blu-ray promise land. While this is a no brainer considering the relationship between Warner and New Line, (also owned by Time Warner, just like Engadget) other studios remain up in the air. When, and if, Universal makes the switch as well is any ones guess, but at this point we doubt many would expect otherwise. But, as we've learned in the last few days, anything's possible, but the idea of having one HD format to adopt is something even most members of the red camp can get behind.

While everyone's eyes have been (understandably) fixated on Warner's sudden -- but not completely unexpected -- leap to the Blu-ray wagon, we've been wondering what would happen to New Line (owned by Time Warner, which also owns Engadget's parent companies). As you know, the aforementioned studio is currently format neutral, simultaneously releasing such titles as Pan's Labyrinth on both HD DVD and Blu-ray, but new reports are suggesting that tables could be turning. According to a writeup over at Variety, it outright proclaims that "Warner sister company New Line confirmed it will shift allegiance to Blu-ray only as well." However, a conference call with Warner Home Entertainment President Kevin Tsujihara -- sat in on by High-Def Digest -- reportedly had the fearless leader stating that "[New Line and HBO would] make whatever decision they're going to make," and he concluded by noting that while those decisions should be handed down "very quickly," they "are not covered by the initial announcement." Quite honestly, we wouldn't be shocked in the slightest to see New Line declare its unending love for Blu and turn a cold shoulder to HD DVD, but it seems it hasn't got up the courage to actually do so quite yet.

[Thanks, Ben]
Read - New Line going Blu-ray exclusive
Read - New Line, HBO not covered in Warner announcement

We first learned that New Line would be releasing Lord of the Rings on both HD DVD and Blu-ray during the Warner Total HD press conference last week at CES, but no details were given. Now HD-Insider is reporting some details about the upcoming release -- each movie will be on a single dual layer disc encoded using VC1 and will include Dolby TrueHD 7.1. Release date is still unknown and we can only assume that if the title is released the second half of the year it will be a Total HD disc.

Microsoft wasn't the only one with something to show off yesterday, the rest of the HD DVD camp was on hand to show off what they've done in the months since launch and what we can expect for the rest of the year. On the hardware side there is of course the Xbox 360 drive, as well as Toshiba's HD-A1 and HD-XA1 players already on shelves. A Toshiba exec stated the cheaper A1 is outselling its more expensive counterpart by a ratio of 5-1, although that may not mean much as it is much more widely available. Depending on who you ask, Warner Home Video exec Steve Nickerson either said there are as many HD DVD players sold as there were DVD players in all of 1997, or that there will be by the end of this year. Seeing as there were about 300,000 DVD players sold in '97 and HD DVD is still in the "tens of" range, we'll go with the latter interpretation.

As far as software, Paramount Home Entertainment, New Line Home Entertainment, Universal Studios Home Entertainment and Warner Home Video were all on hand, however New Line does not expect to release any discs on either format until early 2007. Warner will release between 35 and 50 additional titles by the end of this year, 60 total from Universal, while Paramount expects to "probably double" its ten movies currently available by the end of this year. All in all they expect as many as 150 HD DVD discs for consumers to choose from in 2006. We can still look forward to limited availability of interactive additional features on discs this year as the studios continue to gauge customer reaction to the new technology to predict what will work best in 2007.

Even with all the positivity and good consumer reactions, it's hard to ignore that HD DVD is still talking thousands, while Blu-ray will be saying millions after the PS3 launch in November.

[Via AVS Forum]