Paramount Add The Godfather to its Sapphire Series.

Paramount did quite a job with their first two Sapphire Series Blu-rays, packing Braveheart and Gladiator with enough new extra features and excellent audio and visual performance to make them the definitive editions of their respective movies.  Forrest Gump is perhaps not as impressive, having only a small amount of new features over the existing Collector's Edition DVD, but the HD treatment is enough for most fans to warrant an upgrade.

So it is both odd and exciting that the next additions to the Sapphire Series family are to be individual discs of Coppola's Godfather and Godfather: Part II.  It's odd for several reasons, in that there is already an excellent boxset featuring all three movies remastered under the director's watchful eye, that same boxset has another disc full of extras and that fans would have already snapped that up when it was released.  Casual fans will probably own the DVD set and have no wish to upgrade.

So unless Paramount have something else planned for this release, we're not quite sure who it's aimed at, hence the slight excitement that something else will be coming - another feature length retrospective documentary perhaps?  Whatever the case, the two new Sapphire series discs will be out on February 2nd 2010 in the USA and the retail price will be $39.99 each, not so much of a bargain when all three can be had for $10 more at Amazon!