MARS ATTACKS (1996) - 4K UHD Release 31th August 2026
THE REVISIT
Revisiting Mars Attacks! thirty years after its original release is a fascinating reminder that sometimes a film can simply arrive at the wrong moment.
In 1996, Tim Burton was one of the most bankable and recognisable filmmakers in Hollywood. He had already given us Beetlejuice, Batman, Edward Scissorhands, Batman Returns and Ed Wood, while The Nightmare Before Christmas had established him as one of cinema's great visual eccentrics. If anyone could convince a major studio that a feature-length adaptation of a set of deliberately ridiculous 1960s trading cards was a good idea, it was Burton.
And Warner Bros. certainly seemed to believe in the idea.
An $80 million production starring Jack Nicholson, Glenn Close, Annette Bening, Pierce Brosnan, Danny DeVito, Martin Short, Sarah Jessica Parker, Michael J. Fox, Rod Steiger, Natalie Portman and a host of other familiar faces was hardly a modest gamble. On paper, Mars Attacks! looked like an almost perfect collision of blockbuster spectacle, star power, comedy and Burton's unmistakable visual imagination.
There was just one problem….Hollywood had already invaded Earth.
Earlier that same year, Independence Day had turned alien invasion into one of the defining blockbuster spectacles of the 1990s, earning more than $300 million domestically alone.
Then, six months later, Mars Attacks! arrived to essentially tell audiences that the apocalypse was ridiculous now that’s a difficult to imagine a more awkward commercial proposition.
The film ultimately earned around $101 million worldwide against its substantial production budget, with only $37.8 million coming from the domestic market.
Thirty years later, however, its reputation has changed considerably.
WHY THIS FILM STILL MATTERS
The strangest thing about Mars Attacks! in retrospect is how completely misunderstood its intentions may have been. This wasn't trying to be Independence Day.
Where Roland Emmerich's film embraced the fantasy of humanity uniting against an overwhelming extraterrestrial threat, Burton went in the opposite direction. His Martians are deliberately grotesque, stupid-looking, destructive little bastards who communicate almost entirely through Ack! Ack! and exist within a world that feels like a deranged Saturday morning cartoon.
That distinction may explain some of the film's original reception.
Audiences arriving for another giant alien invasion spectacular were instead handed a deliberately artificial satire of 1950s science fiction, wrapped around a collection of caricatured politicians, celebrities, military figures and American stereotypes.
Even the enormous cast is part of the joke.
Nicholson isn't simply the President of the United States. He's also Art Land, a sleazy Las Vegas property developer. Glenn Close's First Lady is obsessed with social appearances. Pierce Brosnan's scientist is almost comically British in his belief that the Martians must be peaceful. The military response is absurdly macho, while the ordinary people left behind are frequently the ones who prove most useful.
It is Burton essentially taking the conventions of the big Hollywood alien invasion movie and putting them through a blender. The problem is that the joke cost $80 million and perhaps audiences weren't quite sure whether they were supposed to laugh with the film or at it.
Critical opinion was similarly divided, with Rotten Tomatoes currently recording a 57% critics' score.
Yet time has been rather kinder.
The film's exaggerated production design, bizarre humour and complete lack of interest in realism now feel far more compatible with the cult-film landscape than they did in 1996. In an era increasingly comfortable with deliberately artificial visual styles and genre mash-ups, Mars Attacks! feels less like an expensive oddity and more like Burton doing exactly what Burton wanted to do.
BURTON, THE CAST & THE CRAFT
By this stage in his career, Burton had established a remarkable creative vocabulary with his fascination with outsiders, monsters, misfits and worlds existing just slightly to the left of reality had already defined much of his filmography. Mars Attacks! simply takes those obsessions and points them directly at American culture.
The result is arguably Burton at his most gleefully anarchic.
Jack Nicholson is magnificent in both roles, with his performance as President Dale providing the film with its straightest comic anchor while Art Land allows him to go completely off the leash.
Glenn Close, Annette Bening and Pierce Brosnan all understand the assignment perfectly, playing their characters with enough sincerity to make the ridiculousness even funnier.
Then there's the supporting cast. Danny DeVito, Martin Short, Sarah Jessica Parker, Michael J. Fox, Rod Steiger, Jim Brown, Pam Grier, Lukas Haas, Natalie Portman and even Tom Jones all turn up, creating one of those extraordinary ensemble casts that makes Mars Attacks! feel like Hollywood itself has been assembled for execution by Martians.
The production pedigree is equally impressive.
Peter Suschitzky's cinematography gives the film a wonderfully artificial, comic-book appearance, while Wynn Thomas's production design creates a world of exaggerated 1950s Americana. The visual effects, meanwhile, were pushing contemporary CGI in ways that now form an important part of the film's history. The new Ack! Ack! Aesthetic featurette specifically revisits how that then-cutting-edge computer imagery helped establish the film's iconic look.
And then there's Danny Elfman…
Few director-composer partnerships in modern cinema are as instantly recognisable as Burton and Elfman, and Mars Attacks! is another glorious example of their collaboration. Elfman's score swings between bombastic science-fiction adventure, sinister orchestration and deliberately cartoonish comedy, giving the film an enormous musical personality.
It's a soundtrack that understands that the movie is both a love letter to old-school science fiction and a complete piss-take of it.
THE 4K EXPERIENCE
This is exactly the sort of catalogue title that feels made for a 4K revival.
The new restoration brings an extraordinary amount of detail to Burton's deliberately heightened visual world, allowing the production design, costumes and elaborate sets to look sharper and more tactile than ever.
Most importantly, the restoration doesn't seem to undermine the artificiality of the imagery.
The vivid colours remain gloriously exaggerated, the Martian saucers look like they have escaped from a vintage comic book, and the contrast between the garish interiors and darker sequences gives the film an appropriately theatrical quality.
The increased resolution also makes the craftsmanship behind the visual effects fascinating to examine. CGI from the mid-1990s inevitably looks different today, but rather than becoming a distraction, it has become part of the film's charm.
The audio presentation is equally welcome. Elfman's score has considerably more room to breathe, while the Martian weaponry, explosions and increasingly ridiculous destruction of Earth have the kind of impact you'd expect from a modern UHD presentation.
For a film whose entire aesthetic is built around excess, this is a very welcome upgrade.
SPECIAL FEATURES – ACK! ACK! ACK!
Warner Bros. has sensibly used the 30th anniversary as an opportunity to look back at one of Burton's strangest studio productions.
The new Looking Back on Mars Attacks! is the headline addition, with filmmakers reflecting on what it was like working with Burton and revisiting the making of the film three decades later.
Ack! Ack! Aesthetic is another particularly interesting addition, exploring the distinctive visual style and the technology behind those iconic Martians.
The supplementary material doesn't attempt to overcomplicate things. Instead, it focuses on the production itself and the film's increasingly affectionate cult reputation.
The Collector's Edition also goes considerably further for fans, packaging the 4K and Blu-ray alongside a SteelBook, rigid slipcase, theatrical posters and multiple sets of artwork cards.
It's a release that recognises that Mars Attacks! has become something of a cult object in its own right.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Mars Attacks! is one of those films where the passage of time has arguably been more generous than the box office ever was. In 1996, it was a hugely expensive alien-invasion comedy arriving in the immediate aftermath of Independence Day. Warner Bros. had an extraordinary cast, one of Hollywood's most distinctive directors and a concept that seemed tailor-made for a giant commercial success.
Instead, audiences got something much stranger. That may ultimately be why it has survived.
Rather than trying to out-Independence Day Independence Day, Burton created a deliberately ridiculous, visually extravagant and occasionally vicious satire of the very blockbuster machinery that had made films like it possible.
It isn't perfect. The episodic structure can feel uneven, the sheer number of characters means some are inevitably underused, and the humour is so deliberately broad that it won't work for everyone.
But thirty years on, those qualities feel considerably less like flaws and more like evidence of a film refusing to behave.
Mars Attacks! occupies an unusual but important position in Tim Burton's filmography. It sits between the darker gothic sensibilities of his earlier work and the increasingly fantastical studio productions that would follow, while perhaps representing his purest expression of cinematic mischief.
And if its original reception suggested that audiences weren't quite ready for it, its growing cult status suggests that maybe the Martians simply needed to wait.
Three decades later, Mars Attacks! remains wonderfully weird, spectacularly stupid and gloriously committed to its own peculiar vision.
Warner Bros.' new 4K UHD restoration gives this eccentric blockbuster the visual and sonic treatment it deserves, while the new anniversary extras provide a welcome opportunity to reassess a film that has spent thirty years finding its audience.
Ack! Ack!
Score: 4.5/5
BLURAY INFORMATION FROM PR:
Mars Attacks! 4K UHD
AVAILABLE FOR THE FIRST TIME IN 4K RESOLUTION
To celebrate the film’s upcoming 30th anniversary, Mars Attacks! - directed by visionary Tim Burton - will be available for purchase on 4K UHD Blu-ray, SteelBook and Collector’s Edition on August 31.
The newly remastered film will also include new bonus content featuring the behind-the-scenes filmmakers reflecting on the making of Mars Attacks! 30 years later.
Superstar Jack Nicholson as the President of the United States greeting invaders from outer space? Anything can and does happen when the twisted mind of director Tim Burton plunges planet Earth into complete pandemonium in this all-star sci-fi spoof.
Mars Attacks! 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray Disc contains the following new special features:
Looking Back on Mars Attacks!
Filmmakers swap stories about working with Tim Burton on one of the 1990s’ wackiest alien-invasion films
Ack! Ack!
Aesthetic Explore the distinctive style of Mars Attacks! as filmmakers reveal how then-cutting-edge CGI shaped its iconic look
Mars Attacks! 4K Ultra HD Collector's Edition contains the following additional features:
Film on 4K UHD and Blu-ray
SteelBook with Acetate O-Ring
Rigid slipcase
2x Double-Sided Theatrical Posters
2x Double-Sided Alternate Artwork Cards
2x Double-Sided Iconic Scene Arts Cards
2x Double-Sided Behind-The-Scenes Arts Cards
★Contents subject to change
BASICS
4K Ultra HD Aspect Ratio: 2160p Ultra High Definition 16x9 2.39:1
4K Ultra HD Languages: English 5.1; Dolby Digital: Castilian Spanish 5.1, Canadian French 5.1,
Czech 2.0, German 5.1, Italian 5.1, Latin Spanish 2.0, Parisian French 5.1
4K Ultra HD Subtitles: English SDH, German SDH, Italian SDH Castilian Spanish, Complex Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Korean, Latin Spanish, Norwegian, Parisian French, Swedish
4K Ultra HD Audio: Dolby Atmos-TrueHD; DTS-HD Master Audio; Dolby Digital
Blu-ray Aspect Ratio: 1080p High Definition 16x9 2.4:1
Blu-ray Languages: English 5.1, French, Spanish
Blu-ray Subtitles: English SDH, French, Spanish
Blu-ray Audio: DTS-HD Master Audio, Dolby Digital
Run Time: 106 minutes
Rating: 12
RRP: £23 4K UHD / £35 SteelBook / £50 Collector’s Edition
Physical Street Date: August 31, 2026