Neon Genesis Evangelion Ultimate Edition Blu-Ray Registration Opens
This week the long-anticipated conclusion to the Rebuild of Evangelion film series Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time finally lands, courtesy of Amazon Prime. It's a pretty good week to be an Evangelion fan in the US or UK, as it turns out.
GKIDS Films in the US and Anime Limited (aka AllTheAnime) in the UK both launched social media posts that fans will have picked up as Evangelion references. They were not made to promote the Amazon release of the Rebuild movies, but to instead open pre-orders on the long-awaited Blu-Ray release of the original 1995 Neon Genesis Evangelion series. Both companies announced that they were releasing an Ultimate Collector's Edition of the series in 2021 quite some time ago. Presumably, the releases were delayed due to the pandemic.
The posts linked to a very cool looking page where you can register your email to be notified when you can secure your copy. The Ultimate Edition is being released by Anime Limited in the UK, GKIDS in the US and Madman in Australia and New Zealand. There is no release date listed as yet, but don't be surprised if it's not before the end of the year.
The two pages are basically identical aside from the company logo (the Australian page is not yet up), so it seems that the UE will most likely be the same across all three regions, too. The Blu-Ray will probably be designed by the fine folks at Anime Limited who are known by UK anime collectors for their beautiful (although pricey) special editions of series and films, becoming effectively the Criterion of anime.
As for what the set will contain (other than the original series on Blu-Ray), we can only speculate. The two original movies would seem likely, as would a soundtrack of some sort. Will it contain the extended directors cut episodes too? Many fans will also be hoping that the original English ADV dub will be included, but it seems unlikely (the new dub for the Netflix release was requested by the liscencors).
We can get some clues from the 2015 Japanese release, which spanned 10 discs, and did include 'home video cuts' of select episodes (presumably the same ones released by ADV as Director's cut in the US and UK) as well as various featurettes, audio tracks (on the Blu-Ray, not as separate CDs), rushes, the movies (in multiple cuts), art booklets, music videos and promos.
Whatever we end up getting, with Anime Limited's expertise, we expect it to be something pretty special. Anime Limited do normally also release standard editions of their releases at a later date, so if you want just the show, without the extra bells and whistles, hopefully you will also have that option.
Register for updates here:
