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Last week I left a thread hanging. Writing about Criterion’s Frankenstein and the 158 minute cut that nobody will discuss, I noted that KPop Demon Hunters was dated for November and that nobody yet knew what it would carry.
It arrived four days later, on Tuesday. The answer is stranger than the question.
Frankenstein came in a four disc set with two feature length versions of the film, each with its own 4K master and its own Dolby Atmos track, and a del Toro commentary recorded for the longer cut alone. KPop Demon Hunters comes in three discs and there is no audio commentary on any of them. Not from Maggie Kang, not from Chris Appelhans, not from anybody. The 4K is an upscale, which blu-ray.com’s resolution field states plainly and Criterion’s own booklet does not address at all. There is no alternate version of the film.
What there is instead is the single most unusual extra I have seen on a studio animation release in years: a full length animatic, running ninety five minutes and twenty seven seconds and divided into eleven chapters. That is the entire film in storyboard form, very nearly as long as the ninety six minute feature itself.
The rest of the package is substantial, and more of it is Criterion’s own work than I expected. KPop Demon Hunters: The Journey runs forty eight minutes and fifty nine seconds and was produced exclusively by Criterion this year. Then two new featurettes by Taylor Ramos and Tony Zhou, the pair behind Every Frame a Painting: How It’s Done: The Airplane Sequence at eleven fifty two, and Song & Story at thirteen twenty six. Seven lyric videos and the two and a half minute trailer sit on the movie disc, and everything above is on a fifty gigabyte third disc given over to supplements. Collectible postcards and an essay by the critic Karen Han in the package. Three discs, one BD-66 and two BD-50s, Dolby Atmos with a Dolby TrueHD 7.1 track alongside it, Dolby Vision and HDR10, 2.39:1, and a list price of $49.95.
So on consecutive Tuesdays Criterion has taken two Netflix originals and treated them in ways that have almost nothing in common.
One got the version of record, a cut no other release carries, with the director talking over the whole of it. The other got the construction drawings and no commentary at all.
I want to be careful here, because the easy reading is that somebody withheld something, and I have no evidence of that. Nobody has described either deal. I have found no comment from Netflix on either one, and Criterion does not publish its licensing terms.
One explanation is already off the table, though, and it is the kindest one. The directors were not unavailable. Criterion’s own announcement describes the animatic as carrying a new introduction by Kang and Appelhans. Randy Miller III, reviewing the disc for blu-ray.com on 29 October, describes what is actually on it as a one minute forty two second introduction by Kang alone. Those two accounts do not match and I cannot reconcile them, so take both. Either way somebody sat down and recorded something new for this release. They simply did not record a commentary, or were not asked to, and nobody is going to tell you which.
But that is rather the point.
A spine number is supposed to be a promise about the edition. It is the reason people buy Criterion discs they have never seen, of films they have not heard of, which is a genuinely remarkable thing for a consumer product to be able to do. The promise is not that every disc gets a commentary. It is that somebody thought hard about what this particular film needs and then went and got it.
What these two discs show is that the promise now has a second party to it. When the film belongs to a streaming service, the edition is the output of a negotiation, and the collector cannot read the outcome off the spine in advance. Frankenstein and KPop Demon Hunters are seven days and a world apart in what they contain, and the only thing that reliably predicts which kind of disc you are buying is opening the specification sheet before you order.
There is a version of this column that treats the missing commentary as a scandal. I do not think it is one. A ninety five minute animatic is a real piece of film history, a forty nine minute documentary that Criterion produced itself is a genuine commission, and two new featurettes from the Every Frame a Painting pair is another. Most labels would not have bothered with any of it. The thing worth noticing is narrower and more useful: the Criterion standard, the thing the spine is for, is now partly outside Criterion’s hands, and nobody involved is going to tell you where the line falls on any given title.
Welcome to PM Weekly. Let’s get into the week.
This Week on Disc
- KPop Demon Hunters (2025), 4K UHD and Blu-ray, three discs, Criterion
- Harold and Maude (1971), 4K UHD and Blu-ray, spine 608, Criterion
- Gone With the Wind (1939), 4K UHD and Blu-ray, three discs, Warner Bros
- Gone With the Wind (1939), 4K UHD SteelBook, Walmart exclusive, Warner Bros
- White Christmas (1954), 4K UHD and Blu-ray SteelBook, Paramount
- Scrooged (1988), 4K UHD and Blu-ray SteelBook, Paramount
- Shrek (2001), 25th Anniversary Edition, 4K UHD and Blu-ray, three discs, Universal
- The Family Man (2000), 4K UHD and Blu-ray, Shout
- The Last Airbender (2010), 4K UHD and Blu-ray, Paramount
- The End of Oak Street, 4K UHD and Blu-ray, standard and Limited Edition SteelBook, Warner Bros
- The Uprising, 4K UHD and Blu-ray, standard and Limited Edition SteelBook, Universal
- Mutiny, 4K UHD and Blu-ray, standard and SteelBook, Lionsgate
- The Strangers: Chapter 2, 4K UHD, Lionsgate
- The Strangers: Chapter 3, 4K UHD, Lionsgate
- EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert (2025), 4K UHD and Blu-ray, Decal
- Game of Thrones: The Complete Series, 4K UHD, Fire & Ice Limited Edition SteelBook library case, Warner Bros
- The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, season one, 4K UHD, Amazon MGM
- The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, season two, 4K UHD, Amazon MGM
(Three notes. Criterion put out two 4K discs on the same Tuesday and they are opposite cases, which is the Market Signal below arriving in one shipment: KPop Demon Hunters is a 2025 animated feature whose specification sheet reads upscaled, and Harold and Maude is a Hal Ashby picture from 1971, old enough that a negative scan is at least possible, though Criterion has published nothing about its master that I could read. Gone With the Wind forks three ways, so know what you are buying: $24.95 standard, $34.99 for the three disc SteelBook, already marked sold out at Amazon, and $64.96 for the Walmart exclusive with lobby cards and a replica ticket. And Paramount put White Christmas and Scrooged out as SteelBooks on the same day, which is a Christmas slate arriving in the first week of November.
Not on the 3rd, whatever you have read. The Last Airbender that streeted Tuesday is Paramount’s 4K of the 2010 Shyamalan film. At least one roundup listed it as Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender, and I could find no disc under that title on Tuesday at all, so check the box before you order. The Shrek SteelBook is dated the 17th on HD Report’s calendar and unconfirmed by Universal. And seven titles that circulated for Tuesday, Super Troopers 3 and Rick and Morty’s ninth season among them, carried no label I could attribute, so they are not above.
Next Tuesday, the 10th: Criterion’s Marie Antoinette and Shoot the Piano Player both on 4K, Radiance’s Cutter’s Way and Planet of the Vampires, Kino’s Four Rooms, Sony’s Memoirs of a Geisha and Lionsgate’s Saw SteelBooks. All from an aggregator calendar rather than from the labels, which this week is a sentence worth reading twice. And Cinema Guild’s Moving, one of the four we pulled off last week’s list, now shows on the 17th.)
Market Signal
Three big catalogue titles came out on the same Tuesday. Two of them are upscales, and you can establish that in about forty seconds, though not from anybody who made them.
Criterion’s KPop Demon Hunters, a film from 2025, is listed on blu-ray.com as Upscaled 4K at 2160p. Universal’s Shrek 25th Anniversary Edition, a film from 2001, is listed there the same way. Warner’s Gone With the Wind, a three strip Technicolor picture from 1939, is reported by HD Report as coming from 8K sourced transfers, though no outlet I read names the element it was taken from.
The eighty seven year old film is the one with the most resolution behind it. The two animated features are the ones that have been enlarged.
Before anyone reaches for a pitchfork, this is not a scandal and the piece that treats it as one would be wrong. A feature finished at a 2K digital intermediate has no 4K in it to recover. You cannot scan a master that does not exist. An honest upscale from a good 2K master, with a properly done HDR grade on top, will beat a careless native scan most days of the week, and the Shrek disc is a three disc set with a BD-100 in it, which is not what you spend when you are cutting corners.
The point is not quality. It is who is telling you.
Not one of these three facts comes from a label. Two come from a disc database maintained by enthusiasts, which carries a field marked Resolution and takes the trouble to fill it in. The third comes from a review site reading an announcement. Criterion does not print upscaled on the box. Neither does Universal. On the KPop disc Criterion has not printed anything at all: Randy Miller III notes in his blu-ray.com review that the label “has uncharacteristically *not* included any details about the master in their accompanying booklet,” which from a label whose booklets are half the reason people buy the discs is its own small signal. Criterion’s press release says a new 4K master approved by the directors. The resolution field says upscaled. The booklet says nothing. On the slipcase all three of these products say the same thing, which is 4K Ultra HD, in the same typeface, at a comparable price. The distinction between a disc carrying everything an 8K scan could find and a disc carrying a good enlargement of a 1080p master is not a distinction the packaging is built to make, and the companies that know the answer are not the ones publishing it.
And the direction of travel is the part that should bother anyone building a shelf. The 1939 film can be scanned again in twenty years at whatever resolution exists then, because the photochemical element still physically exists and will still exist then. The 2001 and 2025 films are limited by something else, a finished digital master made at the resolution somebody chose at the time, and going back past it would mean reassembling a film rather than rescanning one.
We are used to thinking of digital origination as the permanent format and film as the fragile one. On the evidence of one Tuesday in November, the opposite is true in the only sense that matters to a catalogue. Photochemical elements get better every time the scanning technology improves. A digital intermediate is finished the day it is finished.
Store of the Week
The Little Movie Store, 2001 South 10th Street, at Tenth and McKean in Passyunk Square, South Philadelphia. Dylan and Keri Wise. Grand opening Saturday 24 October, Thursday to Saturday noon to seven, Sunday ten to four.
I want to start with a single line of dialogue, because the owner did.
Talking to Elijah Fischer at Broad Street Review a few days before opening, Wise got onto the subject of films that streaming has quietly altered, and he did not make the case with a speech about ownership. He reached for one film and one missing moment. “You know the line in Adventures in Babysitting where she says ‘you don’t [expletive] with the babysitter’? They edited that out on Disney+, and that’s the best part of the movie.”
I went and checked, because that is what this journal is for, and the answer is better than the claim.
The line is not edited out. It is edited. On Disney+, Elisabeth Shue does not say “don’t fuck with the babysitter.” She says “don’t fool with the babysitter.” The word has been replaced in her mouth, the scene runs the same length, and if you had never heard the original you would never know anything had happened. Worth saying that most of the trade coverage got this wrong in the other direction: CBR reported that Disney+ cut the f-bomb out, and it did not.
It is not the only one. A comparison published by Movie-Censorship.com in February last year logs sixteen changes, and thirteen of them work this way. A homophobic slur becomes “weirdo,” three times across the film. “Bitch” becomes “witch” four times inside seventeen seconds, so that a gang leader ends up shouting “sit down, witch.” “You gotta be shittin’ me” becomes “you gotta be kiddin’ me,” which is a problem, because the next line is Chris telling Daryl to watch his mouth and it is unchanged. Only three of the sixteen are actual cuts: two seconds after the “dead, murdered, stabbed” exchange, two of Mrs Pruitt’s lover pulling his trousers up, about ten in the fraternity house. The usual caution applies, since this journal runs on them. That is one user submitted comparison and it does not say which disc it used as its reference.
But the substance holds, and it holds in a better way than Wise said it. The line was not removed. It was rewritten and re-voiced, which is the version that leaves no gap for anyone to notice. That is a sharper argument for a shelf than any amount of talk about owning things. A disc is not merely a copy you keep. It is a copy that cannot be edited after you have bought it.
Now the shop, which is a good one.
The inspiration was a trip to the last surviving Blockbuster in Bend, Oregon. The business runs on a household membership at $160 a year, and Wise does the arithmetic for you himself. “That breaks down to $3 a week,” he told Broad Street Review, which is right, since $160 over fifty two weeks is $3.08. The rest of the sum is not. “It works out so that if you’re watching three movies a week, that’s roughly 75 movies a year.” Three a week is a hundred and fifty six a year. The point survives the arithmetic, because either figure makes the membership cheaper than renting, but I am not going to print a number that does not add up without saying so.
How many you can hold at once depends on who you ask. PhillyVoice says three titles at a time. Broad Street Review says a year of unlimited movies. Ten percent off purchases either way, a free film on your birthday, and non members can buy but cannot rent. VCRs and DVD players are available to rent too, per CBS Philadelphia in October.
The collection is where the reporting diverges, and I will print both versions because I cannot reconcile them. The Inquirer, on 1 November, puts the library at about five thousand titles, largely donated. PhillyVoice, in September, puts it at roughly twenty thousand held with seven thousand on the shelves at opening, assembled from the Wises’ own collection, a friend’s collection, thrift stores, eBay and Facebook Marketplace, with donations arriving after Dylan solicited them on Instagram. Donations are one stream among five. If you see “largely donated” repeated, treat it as unsettled.
What is not in dispute is the direction of travel. The Wises became approved resellers, and Criterion, Arrow, MVD and A24 supply new releases to the shop. A shop with a couple of hundred members has a trade account with the label that made the Kubrick box.
Wise’s best line is not the one about Disney+. It is this, on what people are doing in the aisles: “Seeing people pull out movies as they browse our store and say ‘Oh, I’ve been wanting to see this one, this isn’t on streaming.’ is what it’s about. You go on streaming and look for something just to see ‘sorry this title isn’t available.’ People are sick of the bait and switch.”
And he is explicit that nostalgia is not the business model. He does not want people coming in once to rent something familiar and never returning. He wants, in his words, “a community and culture of people in Philadelphia who are willing to take a detour in their movie-watching habits.” Seventeen weeks into this column, that is still the rarer ambition.
(Next week: Hi-Voltage Video in North Miami.)
The Stack
What I pulled off the shelf this week.
Rush (2013).
Format: 4K UHD and Blu-ray, two discs, Shout Select, 19 November 2024. One BD-100 and one BD-50. 123 minutes, rated R. HEVC, 2.40:1, Dolby Vision and HDR10. Dolby Atmos, with Dolby TrueHD 7.1, DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 and 2.0 listed alongside it. English SDH. The 4K disc is region free, the Blu-ray is locked to region A. List price $39.98. And in blu-ray.com’s resolution field, where Shout’s own packaging says nothing at all: Upscaled 4K at 2160p.
Bonus Features: A newly filmed introduction by Ron Howard, fifty three seconds, on both discs. On the Blu-ray, Universal’s original supplements licensed over: Race for the Checkered Flag: The Making of Rush at 24:39, The Real Story of RUSH at 18:43, Ron Howard: A Director’s Approach at 7:24, and deleted scenes running 10:56. That is the entire package.
I pulled this out because of the Market Signal, and it turned out to prove the point harder than Shrek does.
Rush was photographed digitally, apart from the archive 8mm, 16mm and 35mm footage cut into it. Anthony Dod Mantle shot most of the live action on ARRI Alexa Plus and Studio bodies recording ARRIRAW to Codex, and then threw everything else at the racing: Phantom, a Canon C300, DSLRs, RED, and the IndieCams he had used on Trance, one of which went inside a helmet. His own description of the range is the part that matters here. The cameras were capturing, in his words, “across a range of different resolutions, 2K, 3K, 5K.”
Five thousand pixels across, bolted to a racing car, in 2013.
And you cannot buy any of it. The 4K disc is an enlargement, because the finish was HD. The only published statement of the finishing resolution I could find is in Dr Stephen Larson’s blu-ray.com review of this very disc, dated 2 December 2024, which says the film “was scanned and finished as a 1920×1080 HD master.” Nobody in the cinematography coverage says it. Dod Mantle’s own interview about the film describes about three weeks of digital intermediate work at Company 3 in Soho with Adam Glasman, around eight hundred visual effects shots, and roughly two hundred and fifty camera moves created in the grade rather than on set, and never once mentions a resolution. It is not a secret. It is simply not a thing anyone thought to write down.
So the 5K material went into a pipe no wider than 2K, two hundred and fifty camera moves were baked in at that size, and that master is now the ceiling. Forever, barring a conform from the original camera files that nobody is going to pay for on a thirteen year old racing picture.
Thirteen years. Gone With the Wind is eighty seven, and the disc that arrived this week is reported to come from an 8K scan.
There is a puzzle inside the disc’s own review, which I will flag because it is exactly the sort of thing that gets repeated. Larson writes that the feature is “sourced from a new 4K restoration of the movie’s Digital Intermediate,” and then, a little later, that “the 4K disc is an upscale because the film was scanned and finished as a 1920×1080 HD master.” Both sentences are on the same page and the review does not reconcile them. A third figure sits between them, because the same review says the footage was transcoded into 10-bit DPX at 2K anamorphic, and that the German Universum disc uses the same 2K DI. So the review gives 2K twice and 1920×1080 once, and those are not the same number. I think the 4K restoration line describes a new pass over an existing master rather than a new scan of anything, and I lean to 2K as the finishing resolution, but I am reading a reviewer’s phrasing rather than a label’s statement, and Shout has not published one.
The disc is still worth owning, which is the awkward part. The Atmos mix is new and by Larson’s account it genuinely helps, with the low end opening up as the cars come round, though he puts Zimmer’s score across the rear channels on the older 5.1 track as well. The HDR grade is the real upgrade. That is the honest position on a great many catalogue 4Ks: the resolution is not the improvement, the dynamic range is, and the box does not distinguish between those two things either.
The extras are the sad part. Shout licensed Universal’s originals and added fifty three seconds of Ron Howard. Meanwhile, by the same review’s account, the German Universum Blu-ray carries all of Universal’s supplements plus nearly fifty five minutes of cast and crew interviews, Niki Lauda among them at nine minutes and eleven seconds. Lauda died in 2019.
And this material has been available in English before. The same review notes that StudioCanal UK put the English interviews on a standard definition disc inside a Blu-ray and DVD combo, and that the release is out of print. So the interviews were licensed, authored and sold in English once already, and the 2024 American 4K does not have them.
And there may be a third bite coming, from that same company. A news item on blu-ray.com dated April this year says StudioCanal has announced its own 4K release of Rush, scheduled for 29 June. I could not read which year, and I could not find what it is sourced from. Given everything above there are now two questions about it worth asking, and the second is whether the interviews StudioCanal has already paid for once will be on it.
The Corrections Desk
We got this wrong last week. Issue #17 said Criterion had just opened its first permanent Canadian shop inside Cinema Cellar. The shop belongs to Cinema Cellar, an extension of the distributor Blue Fox Canada, which opened its own first permanent location at 129 John Street on Friday 16 October under its president Dave Hudakoc. Criterion took the place over as a pop up during TIFF in September and keeps a permanent section in it now, alongside Arrow Video and Kino Lorber. It is a tenant of those shelves, not the landlord. The September trade coverage led us there and we read it carelessly.
Two things we flagged as open have closed, and those are resolutions rather than errors. We said nobody yet knew what Criterion’s KPop Demon Hunters would carry, and it shipped four days later with the answer at the top of this issue. We said Vinegar Syndrome’s November batch had not been announced and would land on the 30th or 31st, and it landed on 1 November.
A method note, because this one generalizes. The useful question this week was not whether a date was right but who had published it. Three releases reached collectors this week with full specifications and street dates attached, and in each case the label’s own side of it either said something different or said nothing. Ask who signed it.
The Sign-Off
That is Issue #18. Criterion’s second Netflix film in seven days arrived with no commentary, an upscaled master and the entire picture in storyboard form, which is a reminder that the spine number is now a promise two parties have to agree to; a Tuesday on which the 1939 film had an 8K scan behind it and the 2025 and 2001 films were enlargements, with all three sold in the same typeface at the same shelf; a video store in South Philadelphia whose owner makes the case for discs with one line of dialogue that Disney+ quietly re-voiced rather than cut; a racing film shot on cameras running up to 5K that cannot be released in native 4K because somebody finished it at 2K in 2013; and a correction of our own about who actually owns a shop in Toronto. 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
