'Citizen Kane' Coming to Blu-ray

Mercury Productions

Citizen Kane, one of the most acclaimed movies of all time, will premiere on Blu-ray on Sept. 13 with a 70th anniversary collector's edition.

The movie, frequently cited as the best American movie ever made and the movie chosen by the American Film Institute as the No. 1 film of all time, was co-written, directed and produced by then 25-year-old Orson Welles, who also starred in the pic, which told the life of a controversial publishing tycoon. It was nominated for nine Oscars and won for best original screenplay.

Warner Home Video is going back to the original nitrate for a hi-definition restoration in 4K resolution.

"The work to re-create the original look of the film and to clean up the effects of aging was a painstaking, frame-by-frame process," said Warner Bros. Motion Picture Imaging colorist Janet Wilson in a statement. "The source for most of the picture was a 4K scan from a 1941 composite fine grain positive master."

WHV is saying this edition will present Kane in the highest quality of any editions yet.

And there will plenty of new extras, too.

The collector's edition will come with a 48-page book part of which will be a 20-page reproduction of the original 1941 souvenir program, lobby cards plus facsimiles of memos and correspondence made during the movie's production.

The new edition will all the extras from the DVD two-disc special edition, including the Academy Award-nominated documentary The Battle Over Citizen Kane, and it will contain RKO 281, the Golden Globe- and Emmy-winning HBO docudrama movie that chronicled the clash between William Randolph Hearst and Hollywood and starred Liev Schrieber as Welles and James Cromwell as Hearst, whose life was the inspiration behind Kane and who tried to stop the movie from being made.

The 70th anniversary edition will also be released via iTunes, On Demand, VUDU and Amazon Instant Video.