Noah Blu-Ray options: do you want more bonus features, a steelbook package, or a Christian pop music CD?

One of the more regrettable trends these days is the tendency on the part of some studios to release multiple versions of a single DVD or Blu-Ray release. Nowadays, it’s not enough to put out two basic versions — a single disc with just the movie and a two-disc set with a bunch of bonus features — and release them both to all the retailers. Instead, the studios sometimes release multiple editions that are specific to individual retailers, so that each retailer can offer a different set of bonus features that none of the other retailers have.

Paramount Home Video is one of the worst offenders when it comes to this — just ask any Star Trek fan — so it comes as no surprise to hear that they are doing something similar with Noah, which comes out July 29.

The good news is that, if all you care about is the video content, then there’s really only one disc you need to get — and it’s not the standard Blu-Ray/DVD combo pack that was announced several weeks ago. Instead, it’s the exclusive Target disc, depicted above, which will come with “wood packaging” and a bonus Blu-Ray disc. Target isn’t saying what the bonus disc will actually contain, but there is some speculation that it might be identical to a bonus disc that was passed by the British Board of Film Classification, which runs almost 48 minutes and has featurettes on ‘The Watchers’, ‘Noah’s Score’, ‘Special Make-Up FX on Noah’ and ‘Sounds of Noah’.

If, however, you like to collect steelbook packaging, then you might also want to get the Noah set that is exclusive to Best Buy in the United States and Future Shop in Canada. As far as I know, the actual contents of this Blu-Ray will be identical to the regular Blu-Ray/DVD combo pack.

Finally, Walmart is offering a version of the Blu-Ray that comes with an audio CD featuring a bunch of Christian pop songs. (So, after all the controversy that surrounded this “most Jewish” of Bible movies, it seems that someone still thinks there is money to be made by hitching this film to the Christian pop-culture wagon.)

The album cover, embedded below, says the songs are “inspired by” the movie, but a quick bit of Googling indicates that most of the songs are between one and four years old. Conspicuously missing from this album: the Kim Walker-Smith song that was featured in the church-conference trailer and a GodTube music video.

The really strange thing to me is that this utterly superfluous CD — which has nothing to do with the movie and doesn’t seem to be giving fans of these artists any new songs, either — currently costs an extra fourteen dollars. So the combined Blu-Ray/CD pack is almost twice the cost of the regular Blu-Ray. It’s not exactly a freebie.

Anyway, as I mentioned above, these discs will all become available July 29. But the movie itself will be available for streaming this coming Tuesday. Pre-order now!