Man, I hope the "Evangelion 4.0" release date doesn't follow the usual pattern in the United States. "Evangelion 3.33" still isn't even out on DVD, but the next movie is not really all that far away, at least in Japan, where it's supposed to come out sometime in 2015. The end of Rebuild of Evangelion is obviously highly anticipated, especially since the film series has diverged so far from its television predecessor. But, "Evangelion 3.0" was bad. Real bad. Can "Evangelion: Final" recover the heights of the first and especially second movie?
First up, the release date: "Evangelion: Final" is tentatively set for 2015, having been delayed from an original 2013 release date. The release date was officially 2015 until recently, but the year is gone from the official website now. A winter 2015 release date would keep the series basically on track: the Rebuild movies have generally been two and a half to three years apart, so there's no particular reason to think that "Evangelion 4.0" would be any later than that.
The trouble is with the "Evangelion: Final" U.S. release date. As you may or may not have noticed, "Evangelion 3.0" just came out this January, more than a year after the Japanese release date, and it still hasn't had an actual DVD or Blu-Ray release date thanks to Funimation extending the theatrical screening release date (now, the home media release is set for August).
If that pattern holds true, and "Evangelion 4.0" comes out in Japan late next year, we could very well not see an actual U.S. release date until 2017. 2017! You could easily just, you know, learn Japanese by that point. To be fair, that's the wide release: to its credit, Funimation started doing festival screenings of "Evangelion 3.0" way back last summer, just around six months after the Japanese version came out. So there will be ways to see it sooner, if you're observant.
But for the mainstream release, it's going to be a while.
