Friday Blu-Ray News: ‘Peking Opera Blues,’ ‘Stranger Things,’ ‘Devil in a Blue Dress’ (PM Weekly Issue #10)

Ask what a restoration is and everyone answers with the image. A 4K scan of the original camera negative, Dolby Vision, a colour grade signed off by the cinematographer.

For forty years, the thing actually broken about Hong Kong cinema in the West was none of that. It was the subtitles. Export prints went out with translations done fast and cheap, sometimes off a second-hand script, sometimes seemingly by someone guessing. Jokes vanished. Names changed reel to reel. An entire national cinema reached English-speaking audiences through a fog, and a couple of generations of us learned to love these films while only partly understanding them.

Read more: Friday Blu-Ray News: ‘Peking Opera Blues,’ ‘Stranger Things,’ ‘Devil in a Blue Dress’ (PM Weekly Issue #10)

Shout! Factory has been quietly fixing that for a year and a half. Every title in its Hong Kong Cinema Classics line carries the same line on the spec sheet: “optional English subtitles translated for this release.” Not inherited, not licensed from whatever came before. Commissioned. When Blu-ray.com reviewed the City on Fire 4K last August it stopped to note the new translation and pronounced it clean. Peking Opera Blues and City on Fire arrive Tuesday in SteelBooks carrying those same discs, with John Woo’s Bullet in the Head following on the twenty-eighth. The metal case is all the SteelBook adds, which is a fair complaint and not the one I want to make this week.

That deserves to count as restoration work, and it rarely does. Nobody puts new subtitles on the front of the box in the way they put Dolby Vision there, because it does not demo well and you cannot screenshot it for a forum thread. But for a film like Peking Opera Blues, where Tsui Hark is moving between farce, opera and revolutionary politics inside single scenes, an accurate translation changes what the film is far more than another few hundred lines of resolution ever could.

It is worth being clear about what this costs a label. A new 4K scan is a capital expense with a visible result. A new subtitle track is a person, or several, sitting with the film for weeks, and the reward for doing it well is that nobody notices. The audience it matters most to is the audience least able to check the work, which is exactly the condition under which corners have always been cut in this business. Shout! Factory has been doing it anyway, across an entire line, on films that already had discs on the market.

The picture was never the part that was lost.

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

THIS WEEK ON DISC

• 12 Angry Men (1957), 4K UHD and Blu-ray, Criterion
• Peking Opera Blues (1986), Limited Edition 4K SteelBook, Shout! Factory
• City on Fire (1986), Limited Edition 4K SteelBook, Shout! Factory
• Star Trek: First Contact (1996), 30th Anniversary 4K SteelBook, Paramount
• The Pink Panther Masterpiece Collection, five films on 4K plus a supplements disc, Kino Lorber
• Arrival (2016), 10th Anniversary Limited Edition 4K SteelBook, Paramount
• Annihilation (2018), Limited Edition 4K SteelBook, Paramount
• Supergirl (2026), 4K UHD, Blu-ray and DVD, Warner Bros.
• Batman: Knightfall Part 1 (2026), 4K UHD, Blu-ray and DVD, Warner Bros. Home Entertainment
• Minions & Monsters (2026), 4K UHD, Blu-ray and DVD, Universal

MARKET SIGNAL

When Netflix and Arrow Video announced a twenty-five disc box of Stranger Things in March, Netflix framed it as an experiment. The creators talked about wanting the show “owned in its entirety, as a way to preserve the show for decades to come,” and the company made clear that further Netflix titles on disc depended on how this one sold. The verdict came Monday. In Britain it passed £1 million in its first month and now sits at number one for retail value on the year-to-date physical chart, outselling every film released there this year. Five seasons, forty-two episodes, £145 for the standard edition.

There is no American dollar figure, because Circana reports units as an index while the British trade bodies report what the country actually spent. What Circana does show is the set entering the US Blu-ray chart at number three in its release week, behind two new studio titles, and number two on the 4K chart. The number that matters is the format split. Seventy-four percent of American units sold were the 4K edition, 61 percent in week two. With a cheaper Blu-ray on the same shelf, buyers took the expensive one three to one, on a set that opens at $143. That is not a mass-market result and nobody should dress it up as one. It is evidence that whoever is left is buying at the top of the price ladder on purpose.

It is also not a fluke, which is what makes it a signal. On November 3, Criterion adds Netflix’s KPop Demon Hunters to the Collection as spine 1333, the fourteenth Netflix original it has taken. The same day, Amazon MGM puts both seasons of The Rings of Power on 4K, Blu-ray and DVD through Alliance Entertainment. Euphoria’s complete series follows on December 15. Notice who is manufacturing all of it. Netflix did not build a home entertainment division, it went to Arrow. Its Oscar winner is going out under a Criterion spine number. The streamers hold the catalogue and the capital, and everyone who knows how to put a film in a box properly still works at a boutique.

The streaming argument was never that discs were inferior. It was that owning things had become an obsolete habit people would drop once they understood they did not need it, and every one of these companies was built on that claim. Netflix tested it on its own biggest property and got back an answer it did not want. The limit is real, and worth saying: these are all enormous titles, this is monetization of the summit rather than preservation, and the mid-budget original with a modest audience still has no disc and no route to one. But the demand was always there, and they were wrong about it.

STORE OF THE WEEK

Kim’s Video (Alamo Drafthouse, Lower Manhattan, NY)

Yongman Kim came to New York from South Korea in 1979, aged twenty-one, and built a chain of video stores that became the reference point for anyone serious about film in this city. Then in 2008 he gave the whole thing away. Roughly 55,000 films went to Salemi, a town in Sicily, on the understanding that former members could visit the collection and that it would eventually be digitized.

Then nothing. For years, nobody outside Salemi could say with confidence where the films were or what condition they were in.

Ashley Sabin and David Redmon went to find out, and the documentary they came back with premiered at Sundance in 2023. What they found in Salemi they describe as sophisticated, creative corruption. What they did about it is the part that makes the film: Kim’s Video ends with a heist.

The collection is now in the basement of the Alamo Drafthouse on Liberty Street. About 15,000 titles restored so far, free five-day rentals, twenty dollars if you also need to borrow a VHS or DVD player, several original Kim’s employees doing the restoration work, and a monthly Kim’s Video Presents screening series upstairs.

Vidiots, last week, was an institution saved intact because somebody made it a nonprofit in 2012. Kim’s is the opposite lesson. The institution died. The collection did not, because a film crew went and physically retrieved it. Not every library gets a documentary made about it. Most of the ones that end up in a warehouse simply stay there.

(Next week: CineFile Video, Los Angeles, and the record shop owner who bought a video store in 2013 to stop it closing.)

THE STACK

What I pulled off the shelf this week.

Devil in a Blue Dress (1995)

Format: DVD, 1 Disc

Bonus Features: audio commentary by director Carl Franklin; Don Cheadle screen test

Carl Franklin’s adaptation of Walter Mosley’s novel came out in September 1995, made about sixteen million dollars, and did not produce the Easy Rawlins series everyone expected. Denzel Washington plays a laid-off aircraft worker in 1948 Los Angeles who takes a job finding a missing white woman because his mortgage is due, and discovers that being good at asking questions is a dangerous skill for a Black man in that city. Don Cheadle arrives late as Mouse and takes the film away from everybody.

This is a permanent part of my collection and it is a DVD, which is the point of putting it here.

The commentary on that disc was recorded in 1999. Franklin sat down and talked through the film, and every premium edition since has carried that track forward. Twilight Time used it. Indicator used it. Criterion’s 4K, the current definitive version, uses it, because there was never going to be a better one. Franklin is thirty years further from the shoot now than he was then, and the version of him that is closest to the film is the one that was captured for a standard definition disc nobody thought of as an archival object at the time.

That is the same argument as this week’s lede, arriving from the other direction. The picture keeps getting improved. Criterion scanned the negative, and the film looks better than it ever has. But the parts of a release that are not the picture, the commentary, the translation, the screen test of a young actor who did not have the part yet, those get made once and then get carried, edition after edition, because nobody can go back and make them again. The transfer is the thing labels advertise. The supplement is the thing that turns out to be irreplaceable.

Criterion’s edition is the one to buy if you are buying now. But the disc I own is where the record starts, and it is worth knowing that a 1999 DVD is still doing load-bearing work inside a 4K box that costs four times what it did.

SIGN-OFF

That is Issue #10. Two Hong Kong classics arriving with translations that finally do the dialogue justice, Netflix running an experiment on whether anyone still wants to own things and getting back an answer it plainly did not expect, Kim’s Video home from Sicily in an Alamo basement, and a reminder from my own shelf that the supplements outlive the transfer every time. 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