Toho surprised fans today with the long-awaited release of Godzilla Minus One to home entertainment in a four-disc 4K UHD Blu-ray box set. I also have an exclusive clip of writer-director-VFX supervisor Takashi Yamazaki and his team from their U.S. visit, plus a look at the different glorious versions of the Oscar-winning film.
The Godzilla Minus One box set is an exclusive through Toho’s official Godzilla site, and includes lots of behind-the-scenes features and making-of footage. Fans of the film have been eagerly awaiting word of a physical home media release, although the film finally arrived on streaming recently and VOD. The surprise today is part of a larger 70th anniversary celebration of Godzilla in 2024.
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The black-and-white version — known as Godzilla Minus One/Minus Color and featured in Blu-ray, not 4K, in the set — enhances the sense of hyper-realism, as well as creating an even tighter bond between this modern masterpiece and the original 1954 masterpiece that launched the biggest and longest-lived franchise in cinema history.
One thing I noticed comparing the color and monochrome versions is how much the tone and impact of the film differ. The monochrome version creates more sense of the film as from another time, the black-and-white mirroring the 1940s-1950s origins of the story and series yet incongruent with the photorealistic effects, and this makes it seem even more real and documentary in nature.
The color version, however, carries more overt kinship with Steven Spielberg’s films, which of course served as inspiration for Godzilla Minus One. It has that very unique sense of timelessness, at once modern and also of any era, while reflective of an elevated reality from our own.
This distinction between the two versions of the film is especially noticeable during the first few sequences on the boats, including the run-in with Godzilla. It’s one of the few examples of the color version seeming more photo-realistic because the water effects and boat effects are so good that the addition of lifelike color enhances everything and ties it together perfectly.
They describe it as:
Be one of the first in the US to own Godzilla Minus One on Blu-ray with the “Deluxe Japan Collector’s Edition”! This Godzilla Store Exclusive mirrors the deluxe 4-disc box set released on May 1, 2024 in Japan, and includes both Godzilla Minus One and Godzilla Minus One/Minus Color.
Preserving the Japanese treatment in both packaging and content, the “Deluxe Japan Collector’s Edition” includes all the same features as the original Japan release with the added addition of English menus and the option to select the theatrical release English subtitles for Godzilla Minus One and Godzilla Minus One/Minus Color.
So it is clearly aimed at an American and English-speaking audience, and yet, the fourth disc has no English subtitles. 🤷♂️