Amazon Jumps The Gun On Sony Pictures Home Entertainment Sept. 5 Release Of Writer/Director Lucia Aniello's Rough Night

Amazon decided that Sony Pictures Home Entertainment was taking too long to announce the home entertainment launch of writer/director Lucia Aniello’s black comedy misfire, Rough Night, so they took matters into their own hands and assigned Sept. 5 as the street for a three-SKU product offering.   Ingram’s videoeta.com website confirms that street date.

The ARR for this Scarlett Johansson comedy comes in at 81 days and domestic box office receipts were a disappointing $21.9 million.   

The home entertainment rollout will open the film up to a wider audience … theatre patrons may have thought that this was nothing more than a summer-season “chick flick” and looked elsewhere for their theatrical viewing choices.   Rough Night is definitely not a “chick flick,” or at least not your “typical” one.

Planned for release on Sept. 5 are a stand-alone DVD edition, a Blu-ray/DVD Combo Pack and a 4K Ultra HD/Blu-ray Combo Pack.

Bonus features include a gag reel, deleted scenes, a sing-a-along titled “Scandalous” and a minimum of four featurettes — “Naughty Neighbor Diaries,” “Improv-o-Rama,” “Killer Cast” and “The Dynamic Duo: Lucia and Paul.”

In other release news from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, Sept. 19 will be the street date for Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind: 40^th Anniversary Edition.   This is a new 4K restoration from the original 35mm camera negative and it will be available as both Blu-ray and 4K Ultra HD/Blu-ray Combo Pack product offerings.

The PR Newswire press announcement was scant on details, but it appears that the 4K Ultra HD/Blu-ray Combo Pack will have three different presentations of the film — the original 1977 theatrical cut, the truncated 1980 “special edition” and the 1997 “Director’s Cut.”   No word on any additional bonus features.

Of note, the film gets a theatrical re-release over the Labor Day weekend.

On the direct-to-home entertainment release front, Oct. 3 marks the arrival of DVD and Blu-ray editions of director Claudio Fäh’s Sniper: Ultimate Kill, the seventh film in the franchise series that begin with Sniper in 1993.