The Force will be with Star Wars fans this fall.
Lucasfilm Ltd. and Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment will release Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace on DVD on Oct. 16.
The 1999 George Lucas film will be the first of the Star Wars pictures to be released in the digital format. The Phantom Menace grossed $431 million in the United States and generated an additional $176 million in video rentals and purchases when it was released last year on VHS, according to trade magazine Video Business.
Lucas did not release The Phantom Menace on DVD last year because he was writing and shooting Episode II, which is due to hit theaters in May 2002.
There is no plan in the foreseeable future to release the original Star Wars trilogy on DVD, Lucasfilm said.
Fans will not be disappointed that Lucasfilm is only releasing The Phantom Menace on DVD, said Chris Choi of Forbidden Planet, a science fiction store in New York.
“The general consensus has always been that Phantom would come out before the trilogy,” Choi said. “Chronologically, it makes more sense.”
Fans will be “rewarded for their patience,” according to Lucasfilm.
The two-disc set will feature seven never-before-seen deleted scenes; The Beginning, a new hour-long documentary gathered from over 600 hours of footage; a multi-angle storyboard to animatic to finished film feature; five behind-the-scene featurettes exploring the film’s storyline, designs, costumes, visual effects and fight scenes; and the original theatrical teaser and launch trailers. The 480-minute DVD also will feature more than six hours of additional bonus material, including brand new visual effect sequences created for the DVD.
The DVD will be released globally as a double-disc set, retailing for $29.98 in the United States.
The Phantom Menace will face competition upon its release from the DVD premieres of The Godfather from Paramount Pictures and The Mummy Returns from Universal Pictures. These films will unlikely harm The Phantom Menace‘s DVD sales because they are not of the same genre, Choi said.
