Star Wars comes to Blu-ray with 40+ hours of content

The first official release of Star Wars on a high-definition disc medium will be on September 16.

All six of the George Lucas super hits will be available on that day, bundled as the original trilogy (episodes 4-6), the prequels (episodes 1-3), and as one super bundle with all of them.

Information on the Blu-ray release was revealed on an official Star Wars website this morning, as May 4 has been crowned the official Star Wars Day. There had been a countdown timer on the site leading up to the announcement, but due to high volumes of traffic it crashed shortly after the timer reached zero.

If nothing else, that just goes to show how much interest there still is in the Star Wars brand. Despite being released multiple times on home video and in theaters, there is still new ground to break with the series, since it has never been released on Blu-ray, or HD DVD for that matter.

Lucas is also planning to release all six films in 3D, with rollout the theaters expected beginning next year. That probably means a Blu-ray 3D release will be heading out in the future as well.

For the standard Blu-ray releases, though, viewers can expect a lot of extra content. Something like 40 hours of bonus features will be packed into the box sets.