Physical Media Releases (Lethal Weapon 2) Lethal Weapon 2 (1989)
VHS (1989) and LaserDisc (1990)
Warner Home Video released Lethal Weapon 2 on VHS in December 1989, six months after the theatrical release. The initial release was the theatrical cut at 114 minutes. A sell-through release followed in 1991. The Warner LaserDisc release came in 1990 in the standard CLV format, with a CAV special edition issued in 1992 that included Donner's commentary.
DVD (1997, 2000)
Warner Home Video issued the first Lethal Weapon 2 DVD in 1997 — a single-disc release with the theatrical cut, a director's commentary by Richard Donner, and a making-of featurette. The 2000 Lethal Weapon Director's Cut release added approximately seven minutes of restored footage including extended versions of the consulate confrontation and the cargo-bay sequences. The director's cut was Donner's preferred presentation and is the version most subsequent home-video releases have used.
The 2000 release was packaged as part of a Lethal Weapon Collector's Set with all three films at the time (LW3 had been issued in 1992) and a bonus disc. A 2006 Lethal Weapon Collection set added LW4.
Blu-ray (2007, 2012)
Warner Home Video issued LW2 on Blu-ray in October 2007 as part of The Lethal Weapon Collection. The release used the director's cut at 117 minutes, with a 1080p AVC encode of the original camera negative. The audio track was a Dolby TrueHD 5.1 mix derived from the original stereo theatrical audio.
A 2012 standalone Blu-ray reissue used the same master with updated packaging. Reviewers at the time noted the film's blue-night Los Angeles palette held up well in HD; some critics called the LW2 transfer the best of the four films.
"The 2007 Blu-ray of Lethal Weapon 2 is genuinely beautiful. The blue-night LA exteriors look exactly the way Goldblatt intended. The cargo-bay sequence at the Alba Varden, in particular, is a near-reference HD demonstration of practical sodium lighting." — Glenn Kenny, MUBI Notebook (2008)
4K UHD (2020)
Warner Bros. Home Entertainment released Lethal Weapon 2 on 4K UHD Blu-ray in May 2020 as part of The Lethal Weapon Collection 4K. The release used a new 4K scan of the original camera negative supervised by Stephen Goldblatt. The HDR10 grading pass was supervised by Donner before his death in July 2021. The audio was upgraded to Dolby Atmos.
The 4K release is generally considered the definitive home-video presentation. The Goldblatt-supervised grade preserves the cool-blue night exteriors and the orange-warm interior key without modernizing them; the Atmos remix expands the helicopter strafing and cargo-bay sequences into the height channels without altering the original mix's character.
"This is how to do a 4K legacy release. They didn't try to make it look like a new movie. They just made the original movie look as it was meant to look. The cargo-bay shootout has never sounded better." — Bill Hunt, The Digital Bits (2020)
Streaming and digital availability
LW2 has been available digitally on Apple iTunes, Amazon Prime Video, Vudu, and Google Play since the early 2010s in HD; the 4K HDR digital version was released alongside the 4K UHD physical disc in May 2020. It is regularly featured on Max (formerly HBO Max) as part of the Warner Bros. catalog rotation.
A laserdisc-era audio commentary by Donner, recorded in 1992, was included on the 1997 DVD and has been preserved on every subsequent home-video release. A separate 2007 commentary by Donner, Joel Silver, and Jeffrey Boam was recorded for the Blu-ray; Boam died in 2000 so this is from archival material, with recent contributions from Donner and Silver. Both commentaries appear on the 4K UHD release.