Criterion’s Frankenstein arrived on Tuesday in a four-disc set, and the most interesting thing in the box is a version of the film that nobody will discuss.

Read more: Friday Blu-Ray News: ‘Frankenstein,’ ‘The Frighteners,’ ‘Hellboy'(PM Weekly Issue #17)

It is called Frankenstein: The Reborn Cut. Criterion’s own copy describes it as “a new, extended director’s cut of the film, with Dolby Atmos soundtrack,” and lists a new audio commentary by del Toro recorded for that version alone. The theatrical cut is also here, with its own 4K digital master and its own Atmos track. The features list specifies the commentary as being on the Reborn Cut, and says nothing about one on the theatrical.

Start with what Criterion will tell you. The set carries two 4K UHD discs in Dolby Vision and two Blu-rays. There is a new making-of called The Anatomy Lesson: Director’s Cut, and a set of craft conversations called The Parlour with del Toro, Jacob Elordi, Mia Goth, Oscar Isaac, the cinematographer Dan Laustsen, the production designer Tamara Deverell, the costume designer Kate Hawley and the creature designer Mike Hill. There are Q&As moderated by Martin Scorsese and by Patti Smith. Also included is an interview with Alexandre Desplat conducted by Jon Burlingame, an essay by Christopher Frayling, and a new cover by Denver Balbaboco.

Now start with what Criterion will not tell you.

Its page for the film gives a runtime of 150 minutes, which is the theatrical version. It does not publish a runtime for The Reborn Cut.

Other people have. Gizmodo and World of Reel both printed 158 minutes on July 15th, the day Criterion’s October slate went up. Forbes gave it the next day as two hours and thirty-eight minutes, eight minutes longer than the theatrical. And Geek Vibes Nation, reviewing the actual discs on October 21st, timed both versions off the player: two hours thirty minutes and ten seconds for the theatrical, two hours thirty-eight minutes and forty-three seconds for the Reborn Cut. Three sources, one of them with the box in hand and a stopwatch, and the publisher’s own page still declines to print a figure.

And the packaging is not shy about it. Of the four discs, two carry the theatrical version and two carry the Reborn Cut, a 4K and a Blu-ray of each, with THE REBORN CUT printed on the label. This is not a bonus feature tucked onto a supplements disc. Criterion has given the longer version half the set, and then declined to say how long it is.

The page runs a full cast and crew block, eight actors and the producers and the designers, and Netflix appears nowhere in it. No copyright holder is named for the film. Netflix financed this and streams it, and I could find no statement from either company about whether the longer version will ever appear there, or about how Criterion came to be releasing it. The closest anyone has come is an unattributed line in Forbes that Criterion “has secured the rights to produce the film on physical media.”

And del Toro, who sat down and recorded a feature-length commentary for this cut, has not itemized it anywhere I can find. In late January, at a Sundance screening of his restored Cronos, he confirmed an extended version was coming and called it the “all the stitches” cut. That was reported the next morning by a single outlet, without a direct quote, and I have found no first-hand account of the remark since. Criterion says the commentary covers why he wanted to make this version.

So the explanation does exist. It exists on the disc.

Which leaves a strange situation. The only people who have described this version with any precision are a reviewer with a stopwatch and the director on a commentary track nobody has transcribed.

The obvious column to write here is that physical media is where the longer cuts live now. I cannot write it, because it is not true.

The pattern over the last two years runs the other way. Robert Eggers’ extended Nosferatu went to digital on January 21, 2025 and to disc four weeks later. The extended Scary Movie went to digital in July this year and to disc in September. The longer version of The Hateful Eight was the Netflix one. Zack Snyder’s longer, R-rated Rebel Moon cuts went to Netflix as well. Genuine disc-only cuts are mostly a DVD-era phenomenon: the extended Narnia that existed on one 2006 release and never again, the Lethal Weapon director’s cuts, the theatrical version of The Warriors.

Criterion has taken Netflix films before, too. The Irishman, Marriage Story, Roma. None of them came with an alternate cut. KPop Demon Hunters was announced alongside this one in February and is dated for November, so nobody knows yet what it will carry.

What I can say is narrower and stranger. I could not find an earlier case of a streaming service’s own original film whose longer director’s cut exists only on a licensed disc. That is not the same as saying there has never been one. It is a statement about where I looked.

The eight minutes themselves are undocumented. No source itemizes what is in them. Nothing I can find says whether the seven-minute sequence del Toro cut on James Cameron’s advice is in this version, and Criterion’s feature list does not mention deleted scenes at all. The only disc-in-hand reviewer who compares the two, writing in T3 on Tuesday, says the extra eight minutes buy “a little more time to live with Elordi’s monster.” That is as specific as the record gets.

Which leaves the thing itself sitting on a shelf, doing what discs have always quietly done, which is to be the version of record while nobody is prepared to say so out loud.

Welcome to PM Weekly. Let’s get into the week.

THIS WEEK ON DISC

• Frankenstein (2025), 4K UHD and Blu-ray, four discs, Criterion
• The Frighteners (1996), Limited Edition 4K UHD and Limited Edition Blu-ray, three discs each, Arrow
• Hellraiser Tetralogy, 4K UHD, four discs, Arrow
• Enter the Video Store: Video Vengeance, Limited Edition Blu-ray, five discs, Arrow
• Sheila and the Brainstem (1989), Blu-ray, two discs, Severin
• The Perros Callejeros Trilogy, Blu-ray, three discs, Severin
• Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986), 40th Anniversary 4K UHD, limited steelcase, Dark Sky
• Surf Nazis Must Die! (1987), 4K UHD and Special Edition Blu-ray, two discs, Troma
• The Sky Has Fallen, Blu-ray, Unearthed Films
• Duplicity (2009), 4K UHD and Blu-ray, Kino Lorber Studio Classics
• A Bucket of Blood (1959), Special Edition Blu-ray with Dementia 13
• Blackboard Jungle (1955), Blu-ray, Warner Archive
• Phantom of the Rue Morgue (1954), 3D Blu-ray, Warner Archive
• Maverick: The Complete Series, Warner Archive
• Seven (1995), 4K UHD, Warner Bros
• One Battle After Another (2025), Limited Edition 4K SteelBook, Warner Bros
• Rad (1986), 4K UHD and Blu-ray, limited to 5,000, Vinegar Syndrome Ultra
• Sweet Sixteen (1983), 4K UHD and Blu-ray, limited to 6,000, Vinegar Syndrome
• The Murder Secret (1988), 4K UHD and Blu-ray, limited to 5,000, Vinegar Syndrome
• Maple Syrup Pix Vol. 1, Blu-ray, limited to 2,000, Canadian International Pictures

Three notes. Arrow’s Frighteners carries four presentations rather than two: the theatrical and director’s cuts in 4K from a new negative scan, and open-matte versions of both on the Blu-ray, which is not how the announcements read. Severin shipped two genuine firsts on the same day, a worldwide home video premiere for Sheila and the Brainstem, scanned in 2K from the original negative in both its original version and a producer’s cut, and a North American premiere for the Perros Callejeros trilogy, in 4K from the original camera negatives and subtitled in English in this territory for the first time. And Arrow publishes no numeric cap on any of its Limited Editions, this week or any week, so if you read a number for one of them it did not come from Arrow.

Not on the 27th, whatever you have read. Grindhouse’s Cannibal Holocaust UHD is 24 November and is still an open pre-order at the label today. Warner Archive’s Horror of Dracula 4K is also 24 November, with a pre-order countdown still running at blu-ray.com, despite two aggregators putting it on Tuesday. Cinema Guild’s Moving was listed on Tuesday by three separate aggregators and the label’s own store says it ships 17 November, which is the case where the label wins. Kino’s Bruiser has no confirmed date at all. Severin’s What Have You Done to Solange? was the 20th. Kino Cult’s Clown Murders is listed for this week by blu-ray.com and for 29 September by Kino’s own announcement, and we could not settle which. Deaf Crocodile’s Frankenstein, Legend of Terror and Soda Pop Joe both appear on this week’s lists and both are still open pre-orders with a wide retail date of 12 January. And the Vinegar Syndrome titles above are not new: that batch shipped direct from the label on 1 September and Tuesday was its retail date, except Faces of Death IV, which came from the October batch, so the interval is not a fixed rule.

Next Tuesday, the 3rd, is thin as of Thursday. Vinegar Syndrome’s November batch had still not been announced, and on past form it lands on the 30th or the 31st, which is to say possibly after you read this. Arrow’s Fargo in a Limited Edition 4K follows on the 9th.)

MARKET SIGNAL

On Saturday, two video stores opened on opposite sides of the United States. Very Good Video Store, in the Oak Park neighborhood of Sacramento, run by Jefferson Miller and Chris Emery. The Little Movie Store, at Tenth and McKean in South Philadelphia, run by Dylan and Keri Wise.

Both of them rent out movies. Both of them also rent out the machines.

Very Good Video Store rents DVDs, sells DVD, Blu-ray and VHS, and rents out VCRs, DVD players and Blu-ray players. The Little Movie Store rents VCRs and DVD players alongside its tapes. In the same city as the Sacramento shop, My Cat’s VHS opened earlier this year on P Street, which one local broadcaster called Sacramento’s first new video store in years.

Now put that against the other thing that surfaced in the last few days.

Sony Japan’s product page for the UBP-X700, its standalone 4K Blu-ray player, reads production complete. There is no announcement, no explanation and no date on it. The page simply says the thing has stopped.

The story did not come from Sony. It came from a Japanese retail blog reporting that shipments had ended, with Sony’s own product page as the only corroboration, and the coverage that followed tended to firm that up into a confirmation Sony has never given. It is worth separating from a thing Sony did announce: a notice dated  February 9th covering Blu-ray disc recorders, which names four BDZ models, states flatly that there are no successor models, and does not mention players at all.

And “Sony’s last 4K player” is a claim about Japan. Sony’s own US site still lists the UBP-X700 and the UBP-X800M2, and Sony has said nothing about any other territory.

The honest version is narrower and still worth your attention. In one market, the company that invented the format has stopped making a dedicated machine for it. Panasonic and Magnetar are both still building players, and Panasonic raised its prices in September, the UB820 from $549 to $649.99 in the United States and from £349 to £429 in Britain, without giving a reason. The coverage supplied one, blaming component shortages, inflation and tariffs. Pioneer stopped in 2024. Reavon stopped, reportedly over parts it could not get. LG has stopped making them too; its last models date from 2018. The field is two manufacturers wide.

So in a few days the hardware base narrowed again at one end, and at the other end two shops opened on the same Saturday in the business of lending people something to play a disc on. The market is improvising its own supply.

There is a second thing in Philadelphia worth having. The Wises became approved resellers and buy new releases direct from Criterion, Arrow, MVD and A24. A shop with roughly two hundred members has a direct account with the label that made the Kubrick box. That is a distribution channel being rebuilt from the bottom after the chains walked away, and for the labels it is a route to a customer that does not run through Amazon.

The membership numbers are the part I would watch. Philadelphia charges $160 a year, and members rent while non-members may only buy. In September the shop reported about 465 people on a waitlist. By late October it reported roughly 200 had joined. Those count different things, interest against money, and the distance between them is the honest number in this story. Sacramento has gone the other way and made membership optional. You can rent or buy without one. What the membership buys is the after-hours programming, the screenings and the Q&As with local filmmakers.

Two models, one week, and both of them are selling the same thing underneath: somewhere to put a disc.

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STORE OF THE WEEK

Bay Street Video, 1172 Bay Street, Toronto.

It is not a storefront. It sits in a small plaza at the base of a 1980s condominium tower, half a block south of Bloor, behind a Tim Hortons. Randall King, writing in the National Post in September, called it a hidden mall. You have to know it is there.

The business has been in that plaza since 1982 and has carried this name since 1993. It is open seven days, ten to eight most days and ten to ten on Friday and Saturday. It was recording its own podcast in the shop on Wednesday.

Here is what is on the shelves, by the manager’s own count: about forty thousand DVDs, just under ten thousand Blu-rays, a thousand 4K discs for rent, and twelve to fifteen thousand titles for sale. It rents and it sells, and the manager puts the survival down to exactly that: “Rentals kept us going when sales were sparse and sales kept us going when rentals were sparse.” It does not buy used stock. The FAQ is blunt about it, and the phrasing matters: “We do not. We’re always happy to accept donations of current formats” BMV, or Vinegar Syndrome’s Toronto shop. A rental library that takes donations but refuses to buy only ever grows by gift or by buying new.

In 2021 the product manager, Mark Hanson, put the whole collection at somewhere in the realm of thirty-six or thirty-seven thousand titles. That is the whole argument, really, and he made it himself in the same conversation: “We have a curated collection that continues to grow but never gets smaller.” And: “It’s library-esque, almost like an archive or a museum.”

A rental shop that never stops being a shop at some point and becomes a holding. Most retail works the other way. You cull what does not move, you make room for what does, and the catalogue is whatever the last two years justified keeping. Bay Street Video has simply declined to do that, and the result is that its competitive position is now defined by subtraction happening somewhere else.

Which brings me to the best thing in this shop, and the reason it is here rather than any of the other three physical media businesses now trading in Toronto.

It runs a program called Films For Free. Every couple of months the staff pick a theme, and those films go out at no charge to anyone with a membership, which is itself free. Two at a time per household, back within five days, late fees strictly enforced. Nothing unusual so far.

The unusual part is the selection criterion. The shop highlights, in its own words, “excellent films which are not readily available via (legal) online streaming services and/or On Demand.”

Read that as a business decision. A commercial rental library has identified the portion of its stock that the streaming services cannot supply, and has decided to give that portion away. Good films, filtered for the one thing streaming cannot do. The shop is spending its scarcest inventory to demonstrate the only thing it has that Netflix does not, which is the films Netflix does not have.

I have been writing this column for sixteen weeks and that is the clearest statement of position I have come across. Every shop in this series has an answer to what it is for. This one has turned its answer into a lending program and put it on the website.

A caution, since this journal runs on them. The Films For Free page was still advertising a summer theme when I read it this week, a list of films from the Ira Sachs guide to movies with kids, and the page’s copyright metadata still reads 2009. The program is real and its rules are published; the selection on the page is not current. The shop’s own YouTube channel still lists opening hours it abandoned years ago, which is a reminder that a business’s own stale page is more dangerous than a stranger’s, not less. And the shop cannot get its own founding told the same way twice: one account has it renamed in 1993, another has it changing hands that year, a third says a property manager took it over and renamed it. A business whose entire value proposition is an intact record. Meanwhile the podcast went up on Wednesday, current to the day.

One last thing, because the easy version of this column would be wrong. Bay Street Video is not the last video store in Toronto. Eyesore Cinema is still on Bloor near Dufferin. Criterion has just opened its first permanent Canadian shop inside Cinema Cellar, between the TIFF Lightbox and the Scotiabank. Vinegar Syndrome has one on Roncesvalles. Videoflicks, out on Avenue Road, closed in November 2019, and its owner said at the time that having no storefront meant no plans to return. The manager, Brendan Whelton, was asked about the new arrivals in September and declined the elegy. “I think a rising tide raises all ships,” he told the National Post, talking about Cinema Cellar and the other new shops. “The more ways that people can see movies, the better.”

The survivor is no longer alone, and says good.

(Next week: The Little Movie Store in South Philadelphia.)

THE STACK

What I pulled off the shelf this week.

Hellboy (2004).

Format: DVD, two discs, Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment, 27 July 2004. UPC 043396013179, list price $28.96. Theatrical cut, 122 minutes, PG-13. 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, Dolby Digital 5.1, no DTS track, Region 1. Single-width keep case with slipcover and a booklet.

Bonus Features: Two audio commentaries, the first with Guillermo del Toro and Mike Mignola, the second with Ron Perlman, Selma Blair, Jeffrey Tambor and Rupert Evans. Eight branching comics drawn by Mignola and written by del Toro, made for this disc. The Right Hand of Doom, eight branching set visits, nineteen minutes. A branching storyboard extra drawn by Simeon Wilkins. Four UPA cartoons. A del Toro video introduction. On disc two: a Selma Blair introduction; The Seeds of Creation, a documentary running nearly two and a half hours, measured at 143 minutes where it was reissued in 2019; three deleted scenes with optional del Toro commentary; animatics, board-a-matics and storyboard comparisons; fifteen character biographies; a maquette gallery; poster designs; trailers. DVD-ROM content including a printable screenplay and the director’s notes.

I pulled this out because of the lede, and it turned out to be a better match than I expected.

Twelve weeks after this disc shipped, Columbia TriStar released Hellboy: The Director’s Cut, three discs, 132 minutes, unrated. It carried a new solo del Toro commentary addressing what had been cut and why, an isolated score with the composer’s commentary, a new storyboard track, the same nineteen minutes of set visits, and a whole third disc of new material: the cast commentary filmed as video, production workshops, a Comic-Con panel from 2002, a Scott McCloud interview, forty minutes of Mignola’s pre-production art, and a printed excerpt from Rasputin’s diary.

It was the better edition. And It was also not a superset.

The three-disc set does not contain the theatrical cut, and there is no branching to get back to it. DVD Talk’s reviewer said so in October 2004 and wrote that he wished the theatrical version were reachable by seamless branching. The cartoons appear to have gone too, though that one is thinner. And the set does not contain the del Toro and Mignola commentary. DVD Talk’s word for it at the time was excised. It exists on the disc I own and on no other release for the next fifteen years.

Mignola was the film’s co-executive producer. The man who created the character was on the payroll, and his commentary still came off the better edition.

Del Toro told USA Today the day before my copy shipped exactly what was happening. The two-disc set, he said, “is for the fan of the movie; the second will be for the collector.” He was not hiding it. Del Toro described the collector’s edition as “really loaded,” which it was. He simply did not mention that the collector’s edition would be missing the conversation between the director and the man who created the character.

On 12 December that year the Washington Post reached for this film as its opening example when Jen Chaney wrote about the practice. Studios tend to cite bonus features that were not finished in time, she reported, “but the biggest motivator is, of course, money.” Her piece says the director’s cut followed “three months later.” It was two months and twenty-three days. Even the article complaining about double-dipping got the gap wrong.

Then it got worse. The 2007 Blu-ray carried the director’s cut only, and dropped the two things that mattered most: the isolated score with the composer’s commentary, and the cast commentary filmed as video. For twelve years the only commentary with Mignola on it did not exist in high definition at all.

The 2019 4K release fixed most of this, and deserves credit for it. It is the first and only disc ever made that holds both cuts of this film, and it carries all three commentaries at once, the Mignola one back where you can hear it. The cartoons came back, and there are now five of them where my disc has four. The set visits came back at eighteen minutes and twenty-one seconds, against nineteen on mine.

Two things did not.

The isolated score with the composer’s commentary has never appeared on any Blu-ray or 4K release. It is not on the 2019 discs’ extras list at all. It exists on the three-disc DVD from October 2004 and nowhere else.

And the eight comics. Mignola drew them, del Toro wrote them, and they were made for this release and no other. They are not on the Blu-ray; the 2007 review named their absence. They are not on any extras list for the 4K that I can find either, and the one 2019 feature that sounds like them is the forty-minute Mignola slideshow, which DVD Talk described back in 2004 as the pre-production art from the third disc. I want to be straight that this is an argument from every list I could check failing to mention them, plus a positive identification of the thing they could be confused with, not a reviewer saying they are gone. But original Mignola and del Toro work, commissioned for an optical disc, last catalogued on a pair of DVDs from 2004.

The measured difference between the two cuts, incidentally, is ten and a half minutes. The published figures run from “about ten minutes” through “roughly fifteen” to “about twenty,” and the twenty is the one on Wikipedia today, sourced to that same USA Today piece from the day before my disc shipped. The studio’s pre-release number became the encyclopedia’s number and has outlived every disc that could have measured it.

I have not found del Toro saying which cut he considers definitive.

Hellboy spent roughly the first half of this year on Netflix and has since left. None of the listings I checked said which cut it was.

Twenty-two years, one director, two films with two cuts apiece, and in both cases the thing nobody will tell you is which one you are looking at. In 2004 at least he told us there would be two. The shelf still answers the question. Streaming still does not.

THE SIGN-OFF

That is Issue #17. A Netflix film whose longer version arrived on four discs with no runtime printed and no statement from anybody, a Tuesday that put two world premieres and a negative-scanned Frighteners on the shelf before Halloween, two shops opening on the same Saturday that rent out the players as well as the films while Sony’s page for its own machine went quiet, a Toronto rental library that gives away the titles streaming cannot supply because those are the ones that prove the point, and a DVD from 2004 carrying a conversation between a director and an artist that the better edition dropped and nobody heard again for fifteen years. If you know one person who still alphabetizes their shelf, forward this to them. That is the whole engine we have, and it is a good one. 

See you Friday.

PM Weekly

Sean Reid

Film & TV Production

seanreid@worldonetv.com