Paramount has announced a January 6, 2015 DVD and Blu-ray release for Richard Linklater‘s Boyhood, though the film will be made available on Digital HD on December 9, 2014. Unfortunately it looks like the DVD will be a bare bones release with the feature film only while the Blu-ray will be limited to a “The 12 Year Project” featurette and a Q&A with Linklater and the cast.
There has been talk still of a Criterion release of the film, though I expect that won’t come for quite some time after the Paramount release in January. Linklater, however, has insisted that they have a ton of behind-the-scenes footage. As he told me in my interview with him back in July:
[W]e have a ton of behind the scenes footage. We had an intern with a camera that interviewed a lot of the actors every year so there’s this record of Ellar, Lorelei, Patricia, Ethan and me. It would be like, Patricia is running off to catch her plane to go back to doing whatever and, “Quick five minute interview” or something like that.
[amz asin=”B00MEQUNIW” size=”small”]Boyhood is looking to become a contender at this year’s Oscars and perhaps a strong contender for Best Picture, which gives good reason for the timing of the DVD and Blu-ray release date. After all, it might have been tough to put together a worthy Criterion package in such a short amount of time and use it to maximize the awards season window. Not to mention having Paramount handle all of that helps with getting screeners and a bigger campaign behind the DVD and Blu-ray reason, thus raising awareness.
That said, the film is still in theaters where it has made over $38 million worldwide on a $2.4 million production budget, which entailed IFC giving Linklater $200,000 a year for each of the twelve years the film was in production.
You can preorder the Blu-ray here and the DVD here.
Filmed over 12 years with the same cast, Richard Linklater’s Boyhood is a groundbreaking story of growing up as seen through the eyes of a child named Mason (a breakthrough performance by Ellar Coltrane), who literally grows up on screen before our eyes. Starring Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette as Mason’s parents and newcomer Lorelei Linklater as his sister Samantha, Boyhood charts the rocky terrain of childhood like no other film has before. Snapshots of adolescence from road trips and family dinners to birthdays and graduations and all the moments in between become transcendent, set to a soundtrack spanning the years from Coldplay’s “Yellow” to Arcade Fire’s “Deep Blue”. Boyhood is both a nostalgic time capsule of the recent past and an ode to growing up and parenting. It’s impossible not to watch Mason and his family without thinking about our own journey.
