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Somewhere in a Warner Vault there are scenes from Interview with the Vampire that nobody outside the production has seen. On Tuesday they come out, on a disc, and nowhere else.
Read more: Friday Blu-Ray News: ‘Interview with the Vampire,’ ‘Angel’s Egg,’ ‘Nouvelle Vague’ (PM Weekly Issue #11)
The film reaches 4K for the first time this week, newly remastered with HDR, in standard packaging and a limited SteelBook. What makes it worth the top of this column is not the transfer. It is that somebody went back for the deleted scenes, put director commentary on them, and persuaded Neil Jordan to sit down thirty-two years after the fact and record two new pieces, one with his editor Mick Audsley on how the film was shot, and one with Dante Ferretti on the production design.
Think about what that actually requires. Someone has to locate material cut in 1994, work out what condition it is in, clear it, conform it to a modern master, and then convince a director with thirty years of work behind him since to give up an afternoon for a picture he finished before much of the audience was born. None of that is cheap and none of it is automatic.
And none of it happens for a streaming refresh. The film has been available on services for years. In all that time not one of them has carried a single frame of this material, because a service has no mechanism for caring. A catalogue title on a streamer is a row in a database with an expiry date on it. Nobody at a streaming company has ever been given a budget line for going into a vault, because there is no version of that spend that shows up in a retention metric.
The disc is the only remaining commercial reason for anyone to look. That is the argument compressed into one catalogue title, and it is a narrower argument than the one this column usually makes. Not that the picture is better, although it is. Not that you own it, although you do. That the existence of a physical release is currently the sole economic justification for a studio to go and find out what is still in the building.
Warner has not said how many scenes there are or what is in them. We will know Tuesday. What we already know is that without a disc to put them on, nobody would have gone looking.
Welcome to PM Weekly. Let’s get into the week.
THIS WEEK ON DISC
- Interview with the Vampire (1994), 4K UHD and Limited Edition SteelBook, Warner Bros.
- Angel’s Egg (1985), Collector’s Edition 4K UHD and Blu-ray, GKIDS
- Nouvelle Vague (2025), 4K UHD, Blu-ray and DVD, Criterion
- The Secret Agent (2025), director-approved 4K UHD and Blu-ray, Criterion
- Johnny Handsome (1989), Special Edition 4K UHD and Blu-ray, Kino Lorber
- Evil Dead Burn (2026), 4K UHD, Blu-ray and DVD, Warner Bros.
- Scary Movie (2026), 4K UHD, Blu-ray and DVD, Paramount
- Kriminal (1966), 4K UHD and Blu-ray, Cult Epics
- Missing in Action (1984), 4K UHD, MVD Rewind
- ChaO (2025), Blu-ray, Shout! Factory
MARKET SIGNAL
GKIDS is not putting its collector editions in shops any more. Four titles, Angel’s Egg, Look Back, Linda Linda Linda and Love & Pop, are sold only through its own website.
Read that against what retail has spent a decade doing and it stops looking like a boutique affectation. Best Buy is out of discs entirely. Target cut its sections to a token presence and pushed the rest online. Walmart has been shrinking its aisle since before the pandemic. The shelf that labels spent thirty years fighting to get onto has been quietly dismantled, and what survives of it is a bin of new releases near the checkout, which is no use at all to a seventy-three minute Japanese art film from 1985.
So a distributor that put The Boy and the Heron in American cinemas and watched it win the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature has concluded that the only retailer it can depend on is itself. Alison Kozberg, who runs home entertainment there, put it in the language of preservation rather than margin: “by investing in thoughtfully curated, enduring releases, we are preserving these landmark works for future generations.” The business case underneath is straightforward. Full margin, no returns, no buyer deciding an art film does not merit facings, and a direct line to the people who actually want the thing.
The cost is the part worth naming, and it is not small. A store exclusive is a discovery problem. Nobody stumbles across a GKIDS release in the GKIDS store. You arrive already knowing, which means the audience for a film like Angel’s Egg is capped at the people who came looking for it, and the accidental buyer disappears, the one who picks something up because the cover is strange and they have twenty minutes. That buyer is how most of us found most of what we love. Boutique labels have been drifting toward direct sales for years and the drift has always been defensible one decision at a time. This is the furthest anyone has taken it, and it is being taken by the label with the best case for wanting a wide audience.
STORE OF THE WEEK
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CineFile Video (West Los Angeles, CA)
CineFile sits at 11280 Santa Monica Boulevard, next door to the Nuart at 11272, the repertory house where Los Angeles has been watching midnight movies since before most of the people in the queue were born. That is not an accident of real estate. It is the business model.
The shop opened in 1999 to “collect and curate rare and excellent films in all genres,” and by 2013 it was going to close, which is what was happening to every video store in America that year. Sebastian Mathews, who ran the Touch Vinyl record shop up the road, bought it instead. He already had a store on a West LA stretch people had started calling Analog Alley, and he decided the block needed the video store more than he needed the money.
Thirteen years later it holds sixty thousand films to rent and to buy, runs on four employees, and opens noon to eight Sunday through Thursday and noon to midnight on Friday and Saturday, which is the schedule of a place that expects you after a film rather than before one. Joining costs five dollars and rentals are five fifty, or you take a monthly membership at twenty dollars for two discs at a time or thirty for four, with no late fees, a store discount and the screenings thrown in. Those run every Thursday at half past eight. This month brought Rushmore, The Faculty, Massacre at Central High and Dead Kids, which is a sensibility rather than a schedule.
It also runs distribution partnerships with Vinegar Syndrome, Shout! Factory and Criterion, which is worth pausing on in a week when a label decided its own website was a better shop than any shop. CineFile calls itself “an archival resource and a bastion for American culture,” which is a large phrase for a small room. But a place holding sixty thousand titles, selling the boutique labels over the counter and putting a 1976 teen revenge picture on a screen on a Thursday night is doing the one thing a website cannot, which is let you find what you were not looking for.
Kim’s Video, last week, was a collection that survived because a film crew went to Sicily and took it back. CineFile is the simpler story and possibly the harder one. It survived because one man who already owned a shop on that street decided a second one was not going to close.
(Next week: We Luv Video, Austin, and the hundred and thirty thousand tapes that came out of storage when a legend closed.)
THE STACK
What I pulled off the shelf this week.
The Mel Brooks Collection (2012)
Format: Blu-ray, 9 Discs
Bonus Features: audio commentaries by Mel Brooks on Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, Spaceballs and Robin Hood: Men in Tights; “Back in the Saddle”; “Making Frankensense”; “Spaceballs: The Documentary”; “In Conversation: Mel Brooks and Thomas Meehan”; a Robin Hood HBO special.
Mel Brooks turned a hundred years old on the twenty-eighth of June.
Fox put this set out in May 2012, nine films across nine discs in a box with a pamphlet: The Twelve Chairs, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, Silent Movie, High Anxiety, History of the World Part I, To Be or Not to Be, Spaceballs and Robin Hood: Men in Tights.
I want to be straight about what is on it, because a box set is never uniform and this one certainly is not. Five of the nine carry almost nothing. The Twelve Chairs, Silent Movie, High Anxiety, History of the World Part I and To Be or Not to Be get a trailer and whatever was ported over from the DVD. Blazing Saddles sits on a BD-25 while the rest are on BD-50s, recycled from its standalone release. The 2009 original came with a hefty illustrated book about Brooks and the films. The 2012 reissue I own swapped it for a pamphlet, which is its own small lesson about what a set loses the second time around. If you buy this expecting nine special editions you will be annoyed, and you would be right to be.
The other four are the reason it stays on the shelf. Brooks recorded commentaries for Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, Spaceballs and Robin Hood. There is a forty-two minute documentary on Young Frankenstein, a twenty-eight minute one on Blazing Saddles, and twenty minutes of him talking through Spaceballs with Thomas Meehan.
This week’s lede was about Warner going back for material cut in 1994 and getting Neil Jordan to explain it thirty-two years later, which worked because Jordan is still here and still working. The Brooks material is the same transaction at the far end of it. Those tracks were recorded when they could be recorded. Whatever nobody thought to ask him then does not get asked now, and there will not be a new Blazing Saddles commentary, ever, by anyone who was in the room.
That is not a morbid thought so much as a scheduling one. Every commentary is a person agreeing to sit in a booth for two hours while they still can, and the number of people able to speak first-hand about a film from 1974 only ever goes in one direction. Those two hours ended up on a disc because a disc was the only thing that ever had a reason to hold them. No streaming service has ever commissioned one. No streaming service ever will.
A hundred years old, and he sat down and explained his own films while there was somebody left to ask.
SIGN-OFF
That is Issue #11. Warner going into a thirty-two year old vault because a disc gave it a reason to, a label deciding the only shop it trusts is its own, CineFile still open on Santa Monica Boulevard because a record store owner would not let it close, and nine discs of a man who did the work of explaining himself while he could. 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
