Director Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 masterpiece Apocalypse Now is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year and to celebrate, the film is getting re-released in theaters later this summer with a remastered 4K Blu-ray on its way in August. Coppola famously tinkered with the film at the start of the new millennium, releasing the 202 minute cut titled Apocalypse Now Redux, but this shorter cut of the final, dubbed The Final Cut, is brand new for 2019.
Coppola has kept some of the additional footage from the Redux cut, but not all of it, with The Final Cut clocking in at 183 minutes, a full thirty minutes longer than the theatrical cut that played 40 years ago. The film will receive a one-week limited theatrical engagement starting on August 16, with a 4K Blu-ray release to follow on August 27. While only the newly created The Final Cut will be screened in theaters, the Blu-ray will feature all three cuts of the film, as well as the infamous making-of documentary Hearts of Darkness.
If you've never seen Apocalypse Now on the big screen, this feels like the right time to do it. I saw the Redux cut in 2001 and while I wasn't floored by it, I was glad I went to see it, despite having seen the film dozens of times before. I'm quite eager to see the new cut and the big screen feels like the right place to do just that.
