Little Shop of Horrors Celebrates 40 Years With New 4K, SteelBook and Collector’s Edition
Feed me, Seymour! Preferably in 4K.
Frank Oz’s gloriously strange Little Shop of Horrors celebrates its 40th anniversary this year, and Warner Bros. is marking the occasion by giving the 1986 musical comedy a new physical media release. The film will arrive in the UK on 19 October 2026, with fans able to choose between a standard 4K Ultra HD, a SteelBook and a packed Collector’s Edition.
Most importantly, this isn’t simply the existing disc placed inside some attractive new packaging. The film has been newly remastered, both the 94-minute Theatrical Cut and 103-minute Director’s Cut are included, and two new retrospective features have been produced specifically for the anniversary.
Considering Little Shop of Horrors contains Rick Moranis, Steve Martin playing possibly cinema’s most enthusiastic dentist, Bill Murray apparently having the greatest dental appointment of his life and a gigantic carnivorous plant singing Motown-inspired songs while demanding human flesh, it is difficult to imagine a better excuse for another trip to Skid Row.
Little Shop of Horrors Gets a 40th Anniversary Upgrade
The new 4K presentation will feature the film at 2160p in its original 1.85:1 aspect ratio, accompanied by a Dolby Atmos-TrueHD audio option. The release includes a substantial collection of existing supplementary material alongside two brand-new features looking back at the production four decades later.
To Feed or Not to Feed: For the Love of Little Shop reunites director Frank Oz and Audrey herself, Ellen Greene, to discuss their memories of making the film and consider why Little Shop of Horrors has remained so beloved.
The second new feature, Mean Green Mother – Creating Audrey II, should be essential viewing for practical effects fans. Oz and Greene are joined by special visual effects artist Bran Ferren and model supervisor Richard Conway to discuss the creation of Audrey II, the increasingly enormous extraterrestrial plant at the centre of the movie.
Existing extras are also carried across, including Frank Oz’s original theatrical commentary, the Frank Oz and Little Shop of Horrors: The Director’s Cut featurette, A Story of Little Shop of Horrors, outtakes and deleted scenes with optional commentary, and material covering the Director’s Cut ending.
For those wanting considerably more than the film itself, the £55 Collector’s Edition contains the movie on both 4K UHD and Blu-ray, a SteelBook, rigid slipcase, two theatrical posters, a 34-page booklet, two behind-the-scenes cards and four character cards. The standalone SteelBook has an RRP of £35, while the regular 4K UHD release is listed at £23.
From Low-Budget Horror to Hollywood Musical
The history behind Little Shop of Horrors is almost as unusual as the movie itself. The story began with Roger Corman’s The Little Shop of Horrors, the famously inexpensive 1960 black comedy about a florist who cultivates a plant with a taste for human beings. That film also featured an early appearance by Jack Nicholson as a masochistic dental patient, decades before Bill Murray would have an extremely memorable encounter with Steve Martin’s dentist in the musical version.
The property was subsequently reinvented as an Off-Broadway musical by composer Alan Menken and writer Howard Ashman, which premiered in the early 1980s and became a major success. Frank Oz’s 1986 film then brought that musical incarnation to the screen on a much grander scale.
Rick Moranis plays the painfully awkward Seymour Krelborn, who works at the struggling Mushnik’s flower shop on Skid Row alongside the woman he secretly loves, Audrey, played wonderfully by Ellen Greene. After Seymour discovers an unusual plant following an eclipse, the fortunes of the shop suddenly improve. Customers arrive, Seymour becomes a celebrity and even Audrey begins looking at him differently.
Unfortunately, Audrey II isn’t particularly interested in plant food.
As the creature grows, so does its appetite, eventually forcing Seymour into an increasingly unpleasant arrangement with his leafy meal ticket. What begins as a colourful romantic musical consequently becomes a story involving murder, dismemberment, dentistry and a plant with ambitions considerably greater than sitting peacefully on somebody’s windowsill.
It shouldn’t work nearly as well as it does.
An Extraordinary Cast and an Even More Extraordinary Plant
Moranis and Greene provide the heart of the film, but Little Shop of Horrors surrounds them with an absurd amount of talent. Vincent Gardenia plays Mr Mushnik, while Tichina Arnold, Tisha Campbell and Michelle Weeks appear as Crystal, Chiffon and Ronette, the musical trio who function almost like a Greek chorus throughout the story.
Then there is Steve Martin as Orin Scrivello, DDS, Audrey’s sadistic dentist boyfriend. Martin attacks the role with such enthusiasm that Orin remains one of the film’s most memorable creations despite spending comparatively little time on screen. Bill Murray’s appearance as Arthur Denton turns a trip to the dentist into one of the funniest sequences in the movie, while John Candy, Christopher Guest and Jim Belushi also make appearances.
Yet the film’s greatest technical achievement remains Audrey II.
Rather than relying on animation to create the increasingly gigantic plant, the production used elaborate practical puppetry. As Audrey II grows, the technical challenge becomes increasingly ridiculous, particularly during the musical numbers in which the enormous creature has to move convincingly and synchronise with its vocals.
Those efforts were recognised at the 59th Academy Awards, where Little Shop of Horrors received nominations for Best Visual Effects and Best Original Song for “Mean Green Mother from Outer Space.”
Two Endings, One Very Hungry Plant
The inclusion of both versions of the film is particularly important because Little Shop of Horrors has one of the more fascinating alternate endings in modern Hollywood history.
The theatrical release changed the much darker conclusion originally created for the film after test audiences reacted negatively. Oz’s original ending was far more elaborate and much closer in spirit to the stage musical, involving an enormous effects-heavy climax that had required a significant amount of work before ultimately being removed.
That material was eventually restored for the Director’s Cut, meaning viewers can now choose between the familiar theatrical conclusion and Oz’s darker original vision. The anniversary release wisely includes both rather than attempting to declare one the definitive version.
Four decades after it first arrived in cinemas, Little Shop of Horrors remains a wonderfully difficult film to categorise. It is a romantic comedy, horror movie, science-fiction story and full-scale musical populated by characters who seem to have wandered in from several completely different films and somehow ended up belonging together.
The practical effects remain magnificent, the songs remain infectious and its cast is almost ridiculously good. Most importantly, there still isn’t anything else quite like it.
Little Shop of Horrors arrives on 4K Ultra HD, SteelBook and Collector’s Edition in the UK on 19 October 2026, with RRPs of £23, £35 and £55 respectively.
Forty years later, Audrey II is still hungry.
