Star Trek: The Next Generation Is Getting A Release Fans Must Own
Just in time for First Contact Day, all four Star Trek: The Next Generation movies are getting a home release with a 4k upgrade.
If you’re a fan of Star Trek: The Next Generation, this year’s First Contact Day — Wednesday, April 5th — is sure to be a special one. StarTrek.com reports that on Tuesday April 4th, Paramount is giving all four Next Generation movies a new packaged home release, and for the first time the films will be upgrade to a 4K UltraHD format. The films will be available as one boxed set — the Star Trek: The Next Generation 4-Movie Collection — though fans who want to pick and choose can also purchase each of the movies individually.
The four Next Generation movies included in the collection — Star Trek: Generations (1994), Star Trek: First Contact (1996), Star Trek: Insurrection (1998), and Star Trek: Nemesis (2002) — will be delivered in 4K UltraHD with Dolby Vision and HDR10, and will include digital copies of each film. There are long lists of special features for each of the films; all of them carried over from the 2009 home re-releases. The collection comes in a slipcase that mirrors that of the previously release Star Trek: The Original 6-Movie Collection, helping both collections complement each other on any fan’s shelf.
There’s no word on price for the collection yet. Star Trek: The Original 6-Movie Collection originally hit retail at $125.99. With not quite as many Next Generation movies in the upcoming collection, it will probably be not quite as expensive, but with a number not terribly lower.
For the first of the Next Generation movies, the TNG crew didn’t get to boldly go completely on their own. Star Trek: Generations features the first and only canonical meeting between Patrick Stewart’s Jean-Luc Picard and William Shatner‘s James T. Kirk. While Generations has its upsides, the film is mostly remembered — and not fondly — for the way in which the iconic Kirk’s passing is handled.
The first of the Next Generation movies to feature none of the original series cast — 1996’s Star Trek: First Contact — wound up as critically and commercially one of the franchise’s biggest success stories. Directed by Jonathan Frakes, who pulls double duty in the director’s chair and also in front of the camera as Commander William Riker, First Contact grossed more than any Trek film before the Kelvinverse movies took over. It brought the popular Borg villains to the big screen, as well as debuting the sleeker Enterprise-E.
Jonathan Frakes’s final time in the director’s chair for the Next Generation movies came with 1998’s Star Trek: Insurrection which is one of the reasons you might want to get the new releases individually. More than any other film in the series, it’s the one that most feels like just a longer and slightly more expensive episode of the show. But, to be fair, F. Murray Abraham is amazing as the obsessed and vengeful bad guy Ru’afo.
Finally there’s the last of the pre-Kelvinverse Next Generation movies, 2002’s Star Trek: Nemesis. It’s by no means the most beloved Trek film, but if nothing else it laid the groundwork for Star Trek: Picard, as well as proving a stepping stone for future The Dark Knight Rises star Tom Hardy who plays the villainous clone Shinzon.
All of the pre-2009 Star Trek movies (TNG and otherwise) are currently streaming on HBO Max, while 2009’s Star Trek and its two sequels are available for viewing to subscribers of Paramount+.
