The official Star Wars blog has announced that, for the first time ever, all six Star Wars films will be made available digitally. From Friday fans will be able to download the sextet of films from a variety of digital distributors including; Apple iTunes, Google Play and Amazon Instant Video. The UK Amazon price for the bundle is £69.00 including both HD and SD versions of the films. Individually the films are priced at £11.99.
Alan Bergman, president, The Walt Disney Studios, said "It's only fitting that audiences enjoy this legendary saga and its many fascinating behind-the-scenes stories on a wide variety of platforms, and we're very excited to finally bring all six films to Digital HD for the first time." Indeed we might ask why it took so long. The first of the six films to be released on Friday will be almost 40 years old. Every Star Wars film released has been number one at the box office in the year of its release (except Attack of the Clones, 2002).
The release will include quite a lot of digital bonus offerings with which the studios will hope to snare more sales to film enthusiasts who already own some of these titles on Betamax/VHS/DVD/LaserDisc. As detailed on the Star Wars blog, every film has bonus content which includes; 'conversations' about the film production, 'discoveries' documentaries, and legacy bonus content. The inclusion of this content is said to depend upon which platform you buy the films on, so perhaps its worth checking before purchasing.
The seventh episode of the saga, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, will make its debut on 18th December 2015. It is expected to gross $1.2 billion. A few weeks ago Disney announced that the eighth episode in the series would be released in May, 2017.
