The Walking Dead: The Complete Eighth Season Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		2.0
Overall		3.5

The Walking Dead: The Complete Eighth Season Blu-ray Movie Review

Lionsgate has released the eighth season of the hit television show 'The Walking Dead' to Blu-ray, in wide release packaging and in this collectible SteelBook, which is only available at Target. The five-disc set is identical to the wide release in every other way. See the 'Special Features and Extras' section below for more on the SteelBook.

The Walking Dead: The Complete Eighth Season Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

For a full video review, please click here.

The Walking Dead: The Complete Eighth Season Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

For a full audio review, please click here.

The Walking Dead: The Complete Eighth Season Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Rather than some kind of subtle or stylized front image, Target's SteelBook release instead features a fairly bland, frankly, front cover. The lighter background color betrays the show's darker tone. Main characters Negan and Rick Grimes are dominant, the former wielding the deadly barbed wire baseball bat Lucille and the latter a trusty hatchet, both "facing off" in Photoshopped fashion. A random zombie, barely standing out from the background, rises above them while across the bottom is a zombie horde on the left, a quartet of the undead in the middle, and a few human survivors on the right. The show's title appears below center, and the letters are not embossed. The rear panel, adhering to that same tonally offset light coloring, features a few zombies strewn across the top before featuring a character collage in the middle, which includes Carl Grimes front-and-center looking ahead, Carl and his father Rick situated behind looking off to the left and right respectively, and additional depictions of the Grimes family throughout the years below, including an image of Lori. Small legalese unobtrusively appears bottom-left. The SteelBook's spine is a little more traditionally Walking Dead, appearing a dark blood-red color. The show's title is centered. "5 disc set" appears at the top while a Blu-ray disc logo and "Lionsgate" appear at the bottom. The glossy case is prone to attracting fingerprints.

Inside, the five discs are stacked atop one another, two on the left, three on the right, the five sharing but two hubs on either side. They're frankly a bit difficult to get out, requiring some bending and force to remove them. Disc artwork is very simple, with each disc depicting two key characters from the season across a black background, which holds true to previous season presentations. The inner print artwork is fairly nice. The left hand side features a hero collage and the right a villains collage. Depicted on the left are Rick, Carl, Michonne, Carol, Darryl, Maggie, Ezekiel, and Shiva. On the villains side is a slightly smaller roster featuring Negan, Dwight, Simon, Jadis, and Eugene. Both appear in front of dark skies, capturing a more appropriately bleak tone.

For full coverage of the relatively scant collection of on-disc extras, please click here.

The Walking Dead: The Complete Eighth Season Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The Walking Dead's eighth season might not have satisfied with the same engrossing, bold, and gritty narrative as previous outings, but its final episode was fairly strong and the place setters for season nine promise some meaty intrigue. The season's Target exclusive SteelBook release, much like the season it houses, misses the mark but is by no means a total loss. The artwork is decent but doesn't appear particularly special or memorable, especially considering the front cover. And since the show's previous seven seasons aren't all available in the SteelBook format, it's hard to recommend this one beyond hardcore SteelBook enthusiasts who just have to collect 'em all.