‘Soylent Green’ 4K Restoration Trailer: Charlton Heston Predicts Our Dystopian Future — and the Future of Sci-Fi Cinema

Exclusive: Richard Fleischer's sci-fi classic, coming soon in a new 4K restoration, was both prescient in its worldview and influential in its imagery, pointing the way to the "Mad Max," "Matrix," and "Hunger Games" movies.

Over the course of his 40-year career, director Richard Fleischer exhibited about as much range as any director in Hollywood. He made his name with gritty noir pictures like “Armored Car Robbery” and “The Narrow Margin” before going on to family-friendly spectacles (“20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,”
Doctor Dolittle”), classic adventure films (“Fantastic Voyage,” “The Vikings”), offbeat takes on true stories (“Che!” and “Compulsion”), and ice-cold horror movies (“10 Rillington Place,” “See No Evil) before finishing his career with a run of eccentric sequels (“Amityville 3-D,” “Conan the Destroyer,” “Red Sonja“).

One of Fleischer’s best, and certainly best-known, films is a kind of genre mash-up that fuses two of the forms the director was most comfortable with: science fiction and the police procedural. Released in 1973, “Soylent Green” was the third in an unofficial trilogy of dystopian thrillers starring Charlton Heston (following “Planet of the Apes” and “The Omega Man”), and one of the bleakest Hollywood movies from an era when bleakness was in no short supply.

Heston is at his most gleefully cynical as Robert Thorn, a police detective who lives and works in a New York City decimated by environmental deterioration and dwindling resources. (The movie is set in 2022, and is thus oddly comforting now in a way it wasn’t when it came out — however bad things may be, at least we’re better off than Fleischer and screenwriter Stanley R. Greenberg predicted!) When he begins investigating the murder of a corporate executive, Thorn finds himself in danger as he learns a bit too much about where the food everyone is eating actually comes from.

“Soylent Green” was one of several sci-fi films of its era that capitalized on the audience’s shared cultural anxieties — others included “Logan’s Run,” “Westworld,” and “Silent Running” — but it’s aged a little better than the others thanks to Fleischer’s vivid and harrowing vision of societal collapse and the clever way he counterbalances it with Heston’s wry black humor and intermittent action heroics. Traces of the film‘s influence can be felt on dozens of films and TV shows that followed it, from the “Mad Max” and “Hunger Games” movies to “The Matrix” and Apple TV’s “Silo,” and though our 2026 might not be quite as grim as Fleischer’s 2022, the movie’s portrayal of extreme class inequity and scavenging for resources feels more than a little prescient.

“Soylent Green” is now arriving on 4K UHD for the first time from Arrow Video, which is releasing “Soylent Green” on July 28 with an abundance of supplementary features. The special edition, which will also be available on Blu-ray, features a brand new restoration taken from the original 35mm camera negative, audio commentaries both archival (with Fleischer and star Leigh Taylor-Young) and new (with film scholars Michael Brooke and Johnny Mains), and extended BFI interviews with both Fleischer and Heston. There are also vintage featurettes about the making of the movie and costar Edward G. Robinson, marketing materials, and a booklet with newly commissioned essays by Frank Collins and Alexandra Heller-Nicholas.

Below, watch Arrow’s new trailer for the film, an IndieWire exclusive. Arrow Video will release “Soylent Green” on 4K UHD and Blu-ray on July 28.