20th Century-Fox Home Entertainment Picks July 23 For The Home Entertainment Launch Of Alita: Battle Angel

850 years in the future we learn that no one much cares about cleaning the mess up, droids, cyborgs, — whatever you want to call them — run rampant and what’s left of the world is obsessed with something called Motorball.   

Alita: Battle Angel is the hot mess that director Robert Rodriguez has delivered— along with scripters James Cameron (yes, that James Cameron) and Laeta Kalogridis (Shutter Island, Terminator Genisys) —in adapting Yukito Kishiro’s series of 25-year old Manga novels for the screen.

20^th Century Fox Home Entertainment announced this past week that Alita: Battle Angel will be transitioning from its theatrical venues to the home entertainment marketplace as a three-SKU product offering on July 23.

The ARR comes in at a leisurely 158 days and domestic box office receipts currently stand at $85.7 million (the film pulled in over three times that amount in foreign markets … rescuing the production from a flow of red ink).

Planned for release are a 4K Ultra HD/double-disc Blu-ray Combo Pack (includes a 3D viewing option), a stand-alone DVD edition and a Blu-ray/DVD Combo Pack buying option.

Bonus goodies common to all SKUs are five production featurettes — “Alita’s World,” “The Fall,” “Iron City,” “What it Means to be a Cyborg” and “Rules of the Game.” 

Exclusive to the Blu-ray and 4K Ultra HD Combo Pack editions are three additional featurettes — “Evolution of Alita,” “Motorball” and “From Manga to Screen” — a Q&A session with producer/writer James Cameron and director Robert Rodriguez, a video session with Cameron discussing his original collection of concept art for the film, Robert Rodriguez provides chocolate cooking lessons and there are four scenes from the film that are “deconstructed” (from live-action to animation).

With the Walt Disney Studios now in charge of the 20^th Century-Fox film asset library and production schedule it seems unlikely that additional films in the series will be forthcoming anytime soon (not even a whisper in the studio’s official May 7 press announcement).   

Indeed, one of the first moves on Disney’s part was to push Cameron’s Avatar 2 back to December of 2021 on its theatrical release schedule — the studio has other priorities, including the much-anticipated arrival of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker in December of this year.