Amazon Prime Video has landed the international rights to “Evangelion: 3.0+1.01 Thrice Upon a Time” – the fourth and final feature in the ‘Rebuild of Evangelion’ movie tetralogy.
Amazon will release the film worldwide, excluding Japan, from August 13th through its Prime Video service. This follows on from the film’s release in Japanese cinemas in March and remains the highest grossing film of the year to date in that country.
Amazon Prime Video will make it available with ten different language dubs (including English, French, German, Portuguese, Spanish and Italian) and provide subtitles in 28 languages.
In addition, Amazon will make the previous three films in the series available on its service.
For those unfamiliar, the “Evangelion” franchise was born in 1995 as the TV series “Neon Genesis Evangelion” – a 26-episode single-season series credited with elevating the anime genre and Japanese pop culture worldwide. To date it remains a cornerstone of the genre alongside the likes of “Akira,” “Cowboy Bebop” and “Ghost in the Shell”.
Created by Hideaki Anno and dubbed ‘essential viewing’ from film critics like David Ehrlich and filmmakers like Wes Anderson, the series begins fifteen years after Earth has been damaged by a cataclysmic event known as the Second Impact.
In the futuristic fortified city of Tokyo-3, teenage boy Shinji Akari has been recruited by his father Gendo to the shadowy organization NERV in order to pilot one of several giant bio-machine mechas called Evangelion against alien beings known as ‘Angels’.
The series explored the experiences and emotions of Evangelion pilots and members of NERV as they try to prevent Angels from causing more cataclysms. It is famed for its exploration of the human psyche, deconstruction of anime tropes, and heavy themes delving into Freudian and Jungian theory and theology from Shinto to Judaism, Kabbalah and Gnosticism.
Famously dense and complex, Anno has been tinkering with the work ever since – first with the 1997 “End of Evangelion” movie which completely reimagined the final two episodes. The full series, including the ‘End’ movie, is available in most countries worldwide on Netflix. Here’s a refresher trailer below.
In 2007 came ‘Rebuild of Evangelion’, a four-film saga that uses a bigger budget, digital effects and a lot of storytelling compression to offer a supposedly more “accessible” and action-oriented version of that original series but with some key changes.
Instead, the films have quickly branched off into their own separate thing with all new characters, storylines and new themes mixed in with elements of the old and remains just as baffling (if not more so in some ways).
This marks the last of those films (the second hit in 2009, the third in 2014) and by far the longest with a 155-minute runtime – bringing the whole ‘rebuild’ saga to a 7.5 hour runtime which is around half that of the original series run.
Check out the new trailer from Amazon for the final film’s release on its service:
