Reception
The film received mixed reviews. It currently holds a 43% rating at Rotten Tomatoes based on 21 reviews. Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert both gave the film a 'thumbs down', commenting that while the film had great special effects, it lacked any real substance or character depth.
Despite the lackluster reception, it won an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects and Meryl Streep was nominated for a Golden Globe for her performance. The film opened at #1 at the box office with $12,110,355 upon the also opening weekends of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Bebe's Kids. It went on to earn over $149 million worldwide.
The film's release on DVD has been named as "appallingly bad", "horrible" and "sloppy" due to the quality of its transfer, which has been said to suffer from excessive grain, blur and muted colors. Many online DVD forum users have theorised that the DVD transfer was taken from the Laserdisc edition of the film and have called for a restorative release. The film was initially distributed in a cropped, fullscreen pan-and-scan edition with an aspect ratio of 1.33:1 in the United States before a widescreen version with its intended ratio (1.85:1) was released and subsequently distributed worldwide. The latter version has also been noted to be mistakenly labelled anamorphic.
Read more about this topic: Death Becomes Her
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