With 13 Oscar nominations, the Producer’s Guild award for Best Film and a recent Director’s Guild win for Guillermo del Toro, THE SHAPE OF WATER has surfaced as the Best Picture frontrunner at the Oscars. The movie deserves to win, and del Toro crafted an elegant, beautiful, atmospheric and sometimes twisted fairy tale for the modern era. The movie will no doubt look gorgeous on Blu-ray, and now you can take a look at what special features will come with it. And, sadly, this does not include a commentary track.
The Blu-ray cover and details came out today, and the home release is scheduled for March 13 (on digital February 27). Though the specific details of the features are not listed, it’s not hard to assume what they’ll be about. For example, “A Fairy Tale for Troubled Times” is surely an examination of the film as a whole, and maybe a “Making of” feature, while the rest of the features are pretty self-explanatory.
Take a look at the cover and special features below.
The releases of del Toro’s movies always have commentary tracks, but he revealed to Collider some time ago that won’t be the case with SHAPE. This may break the hearts of del Toro die-hards, but the director has valid reasons for not recording a track:
It’s one of the Blu-rays that has a lot of behind-the-scenes making-of featurettes and stuff like that. It’s the first Blu-ray that I've made that I refused to do a commentary track on. And it’s because I feel, for the first time, I think whatever the movie does it does on its own. You can buy The Art Of book or come to an evening with the movie and I’ll talk—I’m not refusing to talk—but I don’t need to put it on a commentary track.
This Blu-ray is certainly one I will be adding to my collection, even though part of me wants to wait for whatever Criterion collection edition comes out down the road. Past del Toro movies like DEVIL’S BACKBONE and PAN LABYRINTH have gotten Criterion releases, and there’s no reason to think they wouldn’t do the same with SHAPE down the road. But that may be deep into the future, and what are you gonna do until then, rent the movie at Redbox?
THE SHAPE OF WATER hits digital February 27 and Blu-Ray March 13.