Right on heels of the Blu-ray release of both Phantasm Remastered and Phantasm: Ravager, writer/director Don Coscarelli has announced that a six-disc box set of the sci-fi horror series is due out this spring. The Phantasm Collection will feature all five films, presumably including both the original 1979 version of Phantasm as well as the 2016 remastered edition. The sixth disc will “[bring] together cast and crew to look back and celebrate the Phantasm franchise, including commentaries and new featurettes.”
It’ll be interesting to see what makes its way onto the sixth disc: The original film had a constantly evolving script (star Reggie Bannister doesn’t recall even seeing one), and the original cut was much longer than the 96-minute final product. Some of those scenes made their way onto previous Phantasm home video releases, and some were reconstituted into the sequels—a technique used to particularly remarkable effect in Phantasm IV: Oblivion, where a teenage A. Michael Baldwin confronts Angus Scrimm’s Tall Man in a film shot in 1998. Coscarelli has stated that there is “a lot of interesting material in the Phantasm vaults,” and that he is simply “excited to have all five films included in one box set.”
The Phantasm box set comes to us on March 28.