Bill Murray's SCROOGED Is Getting a 4K Remaster for Its 35th Anniversary with Never-Before-Seen Special Features
Richard Donner’s classic 1988 Christmas movie, Scrooged, starring Bill Murray, celebrates its 35th anniversary this year, and because of that, we are getting a 4K remaster of the film! The most interesting part about this is that the new release will also include hours of never-before-seen footage and special features for the movie.
In the film, "High-spirited high jinks on Christmas Eve put Frank Cross (Murray) in a ghostly time warp in this hilarious take-off of Charles Dickens' 'A Christmas Carol.' Cross, who has made the meteoric rise from the depths of the mailroom to TV network president, is mean, nasty, uncaring, unforgiving and has a sadistic sense of humor — perfect qualities for a modern-day Scrooge. Before the night is over, he'll be visited by a maniacal New York cab driver from the past, a present-day fairy who's into pratfalls and, finally, a ghoulish, seven-foot headless messenger from the future."
The special features for the upcoming 4K release include:
Commentary by director Richard Donner
A Christmas to Remember
Updating Ebenezer
Bringing the Ghosts to Life
The Look of Scrooged
On the Set with Bill Murray
ShoWest Clips with Bill Murray
The rest of the cast includes Karen Allen as Claire Phillips, Frank's lost love; Alfre Woodard as Grace Cooley, Frank's personal assistant; John Glover as scheming network consultant Brice Cummings; Robert Mitchum as Frank's boss, IBC Television president Preston Rhinelander; Bob Goldthwait as the scorned ex-employee Eliot Loudermilk; and John Forsythe, David Johansen, Carol Kane, and Robert Hammond as Frank's spirited visitors.
Allen previously talked about the film during its 30th anniversary saying: "To me, Scrooged is a film about love, the redemptive power of love. I think that's the story that Charles Dickens wrote as well. In that sense, these characters are not meant to be realistic, which is why it's such a stylistically heightened film. So to play Claire and Frank, you have to find something that really grounds your characters. That was the key to it for me: Claire had loved Frank since she was a young girl or woman, and there was something that had never gone away even though he had kind of become another person."
We covered the movie in an episode of our Secret Level podcast, which you can listen to here. Paramount Home Media Distribution will release Scrooged for the first time on 4K UHD. "Yule" be able to own Scrooged 4K on November 7th.