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Twenty-eight new titles landed on shelves this Tuesday. HD Report called it the biggest 4K release day of the month, and looking at the list, it’s hard to argue. Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair, finally, after more than a decade of fans asking. Stranger Things: The Complete Series in a 25-disc deluxe box. Mortal Kombat II, The Devil Wears Prada 2, Pressure, all day-and-date with their theatrical runs. Then the deep cuts: Threads and The War Game, two of the bleakest nuclear-war docudramas ever made. They’re streeting on the same day, from the same catalog-restoration ecosystem that’s also quietly finishing Lionheart’s 4K after a restoration dispute stalled it back in March.
Read more: Friday Blu-Ray News: ‘Mortal Kombat II,’ ‘Pressure,’ ‘Soylent Green’ (PM Weekly)I keep writing about what’s disappearing in this space. Sony deleting purchased libraries. Streaming support getting switched off. It’s easy, some weeks, to make physical media sound like a rescue operation, a thing you do out of obligation to what’s being lost.
Then a week like this happens, and the math says otherwise. Twenty-eight titles, one Tuesday, spanning six decades of film, from a 1958 Elvis picture to a video game sequel that came out three weeks ago. Nobody’s manufacturing that volume out of nostalgia. Somebody’s paying for the restoration work, the pressing runs, the packaging design, the shelf space at retail, and somebody’s buying enough of it to make doing it again next month worth it. The format isn’t surviving on life support. Weeks like this one, it’s just working.
Welcome to PM Weekly. Let’s get into the week.
THIS WEEK ON DISC
- Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair, 4-disc edition, Lionsgate
- Stranger Things: The Complete Series, 25-disc Deluxe and Special Editions, Arrow
- Mortal Kombat II (2026), Warner Bros.
- The Devil Wears Prada 2 (2026), 20th Century Studios
- Pressure (2026), Universal
- South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut (1999), SteelBook
- Soylent Green (1973), Arrow Video
- Pillow Talk (1959), Universal
- King Creole (1958), Kino Lorber
- Lionheart (1990), Extended Cut, MVD Rewind (the restoration finally resolved)
- End of Watch (2012), Collector’s Edition, Shout!
- Overlord (2018), SteelBook, Paramount
- The Boys in the Band (1970), Cinematographe
- Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982), Cinematographe
- Deadly Blessing (1981), Kino Lorber
- Battle of the Worlds (1961), newly restored, Film Masters
- Tornado (2025), IFC
- A Bay of Blood (1971), 3 versions, Severin
- Threads (1984), Severin
- The War Game (1965), Severin
- In the Mouth of Madness (1994), Arrow Video
- Ms. 45 (1981), Arrow Video
- Explorers (1985), 3-disc, Vinegar Syndrome
- Human Lanterns (1982), Vinegar Syndrome
- Macabre (1980), Vinegar Syndrome
- Nightwatch (1997), Vinegar Syndrome
- The Mangler (1995), Vinegar Syndrome
- Happy Hell Night (1992), Terror Vision
INDUSTRY WATCH
Remember the merger freeze we covered two issues ago? It just got a lot bigger. On Friday, Paramount agreed to delay its Warner Bros. Discovery takeover entirely, not just the fourteen-day pause a judge ordered, but a full stop until an antitrust trial concludes, or June 1, 2027, whichever comes first. That blows up Paramount’s plan to close the deal by September. The Justice Department and European regulators have both already cleared it. A dozen state attorneys general and the Writers Guild are still suing to block it outright, and for now, they’re winning. Paramount also starts owing Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders a quarterly fee for every quarter past September 30 the deal stays open, so every month of delay now has a price tag attached. The vault everyone’s licensing against is going to stay in limbo for a lot longer than anyone at Paramount planned for.
MARKET SIGNAL
“DVDs, Blu-ray and VHS are cool again,” according to the people actually watching the shift happen. Gen Z is buying physical media not out of nostalgia but discovery. They didn’t grow up with a DVD shelf, so there’s no baggage attached to owning one now, just the novelty of special features, cover art, and a movie that doesn’t vanish when a licensing deal expires. It’s the flip side of everything Sony’s been doing this month: while one company teaches people not to trust what they buy, an entire generation with no memory of physical media’s “golden age” is discovering it fresh, and deciding they like it.
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STORE OF THE WEEK
Movie Madness (Portland, OR)
Founded in 1991, Movie Madness was saved from closing in 2018 by a Hollywood Theatre-led Kickstarter that raised over $300,000, and is now run by the nonprofit Film Forever Northwest. The collection tops 90,000 titles, with the actual archive closer to 102,000 physical copies once you count every format. Alongside the shelves sits a free film props museum, Norman Bates’ knife from Psycho, the severed ear from Blue Velvet, William Holden’s shotgun from The Wild Bunch, artifacts most people assume only exist in a studio vault somewhere. The store is currently mid-relocation to a larger space across from the Hollywood Theatre, expected to open in spring 2027.
(Next week: the Free Blockbuster network.)
THE STACK
What I pulled off the shelf this week.
Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon (1985), 30th Anniversary Edition Format: Blu-ray, 1 Disc Bonus Features: “Return of the Dragon” retrospective featurette, audio commentary by director Michael Schultz, original theatrical trailer
This one waited a long time to get its due. Sony sat on the Blu-ray until 2015, thirty years after release, and made up for the wait with new dynamic cover art from Mondo artist Gary Pullin and a proper retrospective instead of a bare-bones port. The Motown soundtrack alone, Stevie Wonder, The Temptations, Vanity’s “Rhythm of the Night,” is reason enough to own the disc over streaming it. Berry Gordy’s fingerprints are all over this thing, right down to the music, and it took three decades before physical media treated it like the cult object it always was.
SIGN-OFF
That’s Issue #4. Twenty-eight titles in one Tuesday, a billion-dollar merger pushed back another year, and a generation with no memory of the “golden age” deciding physical media is worth having anyway. 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
