Lord of the Rings announced for Blu-ray

All three theatrical cuts released as boxset.

After months of speculation, Warner Home Video put the rumors to rest announcing The Lord of the Rings: The Motion Picture Trilogy on Blu-ray. The massive, Academy Award-winning epic will finally make the leap to high-definition after years of anticipation, just as the cameras start to roll on Guillermo Del Toro’s Hobbit adaptation.

The nine-disc Blu-ray set is scheduled for release on April 6th in the US, and tentatively scheduled for April 10th in UK territories. While most of the supplemental material is said to be comprised from the DVD sets, the boxset will include digital copies of each film and BD Live access.

The Lord of the Rings trilogy, an ambitious undertaking by filmmaker Peter Jackson to adapt J.R.R. Tolkien’s acclaimed fantasy works, is one of the most commercially and critically successful film series of all-time. To date, the series has hauled in almost $3 billion in worldwide box-office revenue and tied a record for Oscars won – at seventeen.

The only negative bullet point is the exclusion of the extended releases developed for home video, meaning that Warner Bros. is preparing a double-dip with an Extended Edition set sometime in the near future – likely to coincide with the promotion of the Peter Jackson-produced Hobbit adaptation.

Anxious fans can begin to pre-order the boxset on March 2nd, and it will carry a MSRP of $99.99.

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