Star Trek: The Original 4-Movie Collection is a 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray/Blu-ray Disc/Digital boxset, released on 7 September 2021, collecting the 4K UHD releases of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. As is currently usual with UHD/Blu-ray double releases, all special features (excepting the audio commentaries and isolated music score tracks) are only included on the Blu-ray version of the release.
The set was released on the occasion of Star Trek's 55th anniversary in 2021. All discs are in two Viva Elite plastic snapcases (each containing the four respective 4K UHD and Blu-ray discs), collected in a cardboard slipcase. As usual with these releases (geo-restricted to the US and British Canada only, as the – former Blu-ray Region B[1] – European releases do not have these) redeemable codes are included for the 4K resolution digital downloads of the third and fourth film theatrical cuts only.
Aside from the fact that it premiered first, the Australian release also differed from the others in that it was not combined with the Blu-ray counterparts into a slipcase, but that only the 4K UHD versions were released in its four-disc holding Viva Elite snapcase packaged within a lid-closed cardboard box. [2]
As is increasingly becoming commonplace, no DVD counterpart was issued for this release. Each of the four films though, saw an individual release in both a concurrent Blu-ray, and with a year delayed (see below), 4K UHD (without special features) format version, excepting The Motion Picture in the latter case.
Contents[]
For contents and special features, please refer to the individual entries for
- 4K UHD
- Star Trek: The Motion Picture (not issued as a standalone release, and therefore exclusive to this, its 6-Movie follow-up, and the Star Trek: The Motion Picture - The Director's Edition Complete Adventure releases)
- Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan - Director's Cut
- Star Trek III: The Search for Spock
- Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
- Blu-ray
Background information[]
- The choice of this four-film only set did raise some eyebrows among fans and professional reviewers alike. The Blu-ray.com reviewer, for example, was puzzled by the omission of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country in particular. [3] Their concerns however, were addressed a year later with the release of the follow-up Star Trek: The Original Motion Picture 6-Movie Collection set, containing the UHD versions of all six original crew films.
- The apparent premature release of the 4-Movie Collection can almost certainly be only explained by the Star Trek franchise's desire to not let its 55th anniversary go by unnoticed in the home video department, obviously bypassing the circumstance that the 4K UHD re-remastering work for Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, and the "The Director's Edition" of The Motion Picture had not been completed yet at that particular point in time.[2] Nonetheless, it did not prevent to anger and frustrate some customer/fan buyers of this set who felt victimized by what they themselves usually refer to as "double-dipping" as evidenced in some of the Amazon.com customer reviews. [4]
- The anniversary incidentally, motivated Fathom Events to organize two theatrical showings on 19 and 22 August of the just completed 4K Ultra HD version of The Voyage Home in select cities. Aside from the film itself, the 2009 The Three Picture Saga special feature was also shown. [5][6][7] Fathom had five years earlier organized a similar event for the Director's Cut of Wrath of Khan.
- This particular release is one of several individual Star Trek releases followed by the professional industry site The Numbers and for which domestic (USA and Canada) home video format sales are known; The Numbers has reported that a little over one year into its release, it had only realized domestic sales of US$1.7 million, which at an average retail price of $US80, translated into a mediocre 21,300 units sold, [8] after which sales came to a virtual standstill. The for a visually vastly improved Star Trek set production seemingly disappointing sales can be explained by either one of four reasons, or any combination thereof; firstly, there were by this time also generic societal trend issues at play, which had nothing to do with Star Trek proper, explaining the diminishing sales of physical home video formats (see: main article); secondly, the 4K UHD retail pricing was still being conceived as very high in comparison to the other HD Blu-ray formats; thirdly, each of the Star Trek films had already seen numerous prior home video format release variants, including HD ones, causing "double-dipping" weariness with fan customers, and lastly, also referring to the preceding point, several of those customers still wanting the 4K UHD film set, chose to await the release of a complete Original Crew film set, they suspected to be issued at a shortly later point in time – a suspicion that was proven right only a year later, and an additional explanation why sales of this 4-Movie set had imploded shortly after its release.
- Even though US and Canadian home video formats are habitually released simultaneously, this time around the Canadian release experienced a five-month delay for undisclosed reasons.
- It was only on the occasion of the 6-Movie Collection release that the individual 4K UHD versions were released, along with the individual Blu-ray concurrent releases of the final two original crew films.
Footnotes[]
- ↑ The Region geo-restricting encoding had, for all intent and purposes, been dispensed with all together by the industry upon the advent of the UHD format, even though that policy change has never been made public officially. This incidentally, has also applied for the Blu-ray disc format, whose region encoding was since late 2009 silently, but gradually, abandoned as well – which in Star Trek's case started with the Blu-ray releases of TOS Season 2 and Star Trek: The Next Generation Motion Picture Collection [1](X) – only to pick up speed from the mid-2010s onward.
- ↑ According to Star Trek.com, the upgrade took over six months to complete, meaning the work on the Director's Edition had only just begun in late Summer of 2021 when considering its April 2022 premiere on Paramount+.
External links[]
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Star Trek films 4K Ultra HD |
Next release: Star Trek: The Motion Picture - The Director's Edition Complete Adventure |
| Star Trek 4-Movie Gift Set DVD • Star Trek: The Original 4-Movie Collection 4K Ultra HD |