Million Dollar Arm Blu-ray Review

Million Dollar Arm is possibly one of the more underrated Disney films of the year.  It has a lot of good feelings wrapped up into it, an almost indie film quality to it, and a really awesome soundtrack.  While it is presented as a sports movie, it really is more of a family drama that takes you through an adaptation of real life events.  If you’d like to learn more about the movie itself please listen to Episode 178 of our podcast.  If you missed the movie in the theater it is now available to own on Blu-ray.

The Blu-ray contains the following extras:

• Training Camp - Actors Madhur Mittal and Suraj Sharma discuss their own pitching and athletic training for the movie. Like their real life counterparts they too had to learn how to pitch and throw a baseball.

• Their Story - A discussion by the real JB Bernstein, Dinesh Patel, and Rinku Singh about their story and how it changed them and their lives.

• Million Dollar Arm: Music by A. R. Rahman - Rahman talks about his creation of the soundtrack for the film  His focus on maintaining balance even through the transition from India to Los Angeles in the film.  And his desire to keep it emotional, while maintaining the focus on it being a sports movie.

• Deleted Scenes - Watch 3 scenes that were deleted from the movie, the last of which is most interesting as it involves some additional discussion about the contest by the boys in the dormitory while still in India prior to the competition.

• Alternate Ending - This is a slightly abbreviated ending to the film.  It has the the same result as the original, only this one takes a bit of a leap and does not have quite as much impact or emotion to it.

• Outtakes - Some simple, funny outtakes.

Here we have a very standard Blu-ray release of a recently released movie. It has the same bonus content problem that many Blu-ray releases of movies that occur close to a new movie.  However in this case there is so much content readily available about the real life counterparts of the characters in this movie that perhaps more of that could have been added to help round out the bonus features more.  The movie itself is still good, and if you missed it in the theater, and are at all interested in the story, it is likely worth picking up a copy.