Bill Murray's Scrooged Is Getting A 35th Anniversary 4K Release With New Special Features
When listening to Danny Elfman's score for Richard Donner's "Scrooged," the 1988 black comedy rendition of Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol," one might get the impression that it was initially supposed to be a horror movie. Indeed, the tone of "Scrooged" is terrifying. The Marley character, played by John Forsythe, is a desiccated corpse with strips of mummified fleshing dropping off of him. The Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come is a nine-foot-tall cloak stuffed with the souls of the damned. In a surprisingly tragic scene, the Ebenezer Scrooge character — named Frank Cross and played with his usual a-hole-ish charm by Bill Murray — faces the frozen corpse of a homeless man in the sewer. It seems that Christmas Eve is not a cheery time for everyone.
"Scrooged" is bleak, terrifying, weird, and utterly hilarious. Frank Cross is a brilliant updating of the Scrooge character, as Dickens' famous curmudgeon would indeed be a greedy, soulless yuppie and entertainment magnate by the late 1980s. The only significant update that could be made 35 years later would be to make Scrooge a blowhard tech bro of some kind. Imagine if, say, Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg were visited by three ghosts on Christmas Eve, eventually breaking down at the sight of his own tombstone.
For the film's 35th anniversary, "Scrooged" will be enjoying an upgrade in the form of a 4K Ultra HD home video release. It will be available in stores in early November of this year. The original film was released on November 23, 1988, so you will have a few weeks to prepare a proper, on-the-day 35th birthday celebration for the movie. One will be able to hear Carol Kane slamming a toaster into Bill Murray's face in all its 5.1-channel glory.
Special features
In an age of capricious streaming executives and ever-mutating online catalogs, owning the best possible version of your favorite movies on physical media is more important than ever, and it seems that the upcoming anniversary edition of "Scrooged" will be the best yet. According to Paramount's website, "Scrooged" will have several new making-of documentaries and retrospectives which add up to 50 minutes of footage. The titles of said featurettes will be: "A Christmas to Remember," "Updating Ebenezer," "Bringing the Ghosts to Life," "The Look of Scrooged," "On the Set with Bill Murray," and "ShoWest Clips with Bill Murray." (ShoWest was the original name of the convention now known as CinemaCon.) The "Scrooged" 4K release will also feature a full-length commentary track from late director Richard Donner.
These special features were originally announced way back in 2006 as inclusions on a special edition "Scrooged" Blu-ray called the "Yule Love It!" edition. Although the disc was assembled, the release was canceled for unknown reasons. Even the most stalwart Blu-ray collectors weren't able to determine why the "Yule Love It!" version was rescinded.
35 years after the release of the movie and 17 years after the stalled edition, those special features will finally be made available to the public. Audiences will see them for the first time, only now, the film will have optimized picture and sound.
"Scrooged" has become a canonical Christmas classic, often held in high esteem among the many versions of "A Christmas Carol" that have been filmed over the decades. It's perhaps the funniest version of the story, and likely the most horror-forward as well. It's a wonderful film for those who feel very warm about the Christmas season as well as for the Scrooges of the world.
Paramount Home Entertainment will release the 4K version of "Scrooged" on November 7, 2023.