Will older films be produced on blu-ray or HD?

Just like they colorize many old B&W movies, they may someday try to computer re-engineer old movies to something sharper than it appeared originally. It may not be technologically available as we speak, but in a few years who knows. Might be the only choice if regular DVD is discontinued someday.

I am surprised they did not digitally remove the wires in that Matrix example..

Same for the cost. Digital effects use to be very expensive; now any Joe/Jane with a Apple PC can produce better effects than George Lucas could 5 years ago.

You would be suprised at the quality and condition of some of the older films from the 40s, when and if they are transfered to HD they will be superior to the current dvd format.

Some older films have already had hi-def transfers to HD DVD. I already watched the HD DVD version of Spartacus from Netflix. And one of the free HD DVDs available from Toshiba with the purchase of a player is Casablanca.

If there's one company that seems really committed to high-def digital, it's Universal. They have a really nice HD station, Universal HD, which shows really nice 1080 digital transfers of movies going back 15-20 years, plus the Northern Exposure series. Anything they show on that network means they've already done a high-rez digital transfer, and many if not all the films they show there are--or probably will be--available on HD DVD.

Universal has 129 HD DVDs available to date, and many of them are from 10-20 years ago, some vintage. To see them all, click here and click the [Next] button to flip through their offerings. So far everything from them that I've seen on the UHD channel or on HD DVD has looked really good. In the case of Spartacus, the limiting factor was the film grain itself, not the digital resolution.