Tuesday, January 22, 2019

Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Announces Street Dates For Creed II (Mar. 5) And Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (Mar. 12)


DVD & Blu-ray Release Report, Ralph Tribbey
It was a one-two punch this week from Warner Bros. Home Entertainment as not one, but current theatrical hits got their marching orders for the home entertainment arena.

Up first is the latest blockbuster in Sylvester Stallone’s decades-long Rocky film series, the Mar. 5 debut of the Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures’ production of director Steven Caple Jr.’s Creed II, starring Stallone as the iconic "Rocky" Balboa, who has taken Apollo Creed’s son (played by Michael B. Jordan — Black Panther, Fantastic Four, Fruitvale Station) under his wing.

Creed II arrives as a three-SKU product offering — Combo Pack for both Blu-ray (with DVD) and 4K Ultra HD (with Blu-ray) and a stand-alone edition — and that first-Tuesday-in-March street date yields an ARR of 102 days.   Box office receipts for this eighth installment in the Rocky film franchise series (something like $1.7 billion in worldwide ticket sales since 1976) were a stellar $114.9 million.

DVD & Blu-ray Release Report, Ralph TribbeyAs to bonus features, the featurette titled “The Rocky Legacy” is common to all home entertainment packaged media release configurations.    Exclusive to the Blu-ray and 4K Ultra HD SKUs are deleted scenes and three additional featurettes — “From Father to Son, Blood Runs Hot,” “Finding the Authentic” and The Women of Creed II.”

The other theatrical blockbuster “punch” landed this past week by Warner Bros. Home Entertainment was the press announcement for director David Yates’ wizarding tale, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald.

DVD & Blu-ray Release Report, Ralph Tribbey
Its home entertainment launch follows one week after Creed II with a Mar. 12 street date.   The ARR works out to 116 days and domestic ticket sales generated during the Thanksgiving/Christmas holiday period were a toasty $158.5 million (already in the works is the third installment in this Harry Potter spin-off film series ... Thanksgiving of 2020).

Lined up as consumer purchase options for the release of Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald are the same SKU configurations as Creed II — DVD and Combo Packs for both Blu-ray (with DVD) and 4K Ultra HD (with Blu-ray).

Bonus features include deleted scenes, a trio of featurettes — “J.K. Rowling: A World Revealed,” “Wizards on Screen, Fans in Real Life” and “Distinctly Dumbledore” — plus the six part film production series titled “Unlocking Scene Secrets” … the six segments are variously titled: “The Return to Hogwarts,” “Newt’s Menagerie,” “Credence, Nagini and the Circus Arcanus,” “Paris and Place Cachée,” “Ministere des Affaires Magiques” and “Grindelwald's Escape and the Ring of Fire.”

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