Advertisement
Sony has two different ways of telling you not to trust it.
The first is loud: GTA 6, one of the biggest game releases in history, is shipping without a disc option on at least one platform. PlayStation itself is done with physical games entirely by January 2028. That’s the headline version, the one everyone already expects by now.
Read more: Friday Blu-Ray News: ‘Pleasantville,’ ‘Cruel Story of Youth,’ ‘Unlawful Entry’ (PM Weekly #3)The second is quieter, and somehow worse. Starting in November, roughly seventy one older Sony soundbars, AV receivers, and Blu-ray players lose their streaming app support. Spotify, Netflix, Google Cast, gone from hardware people already own and paid for. Not because the hardware broke, but because Sony decided it was done maintaining the software that made it useful.
Here’s the thing that connects them. Nobody buys a Blu-ray player worried that Sony will one day remotely lobotomize it. You buy a disc player because the whole point of a disc player is that it doesn’t need permission from a server to keep working. But if it’s smart enough to stream Netflix, it’s smart enough to be turned off from the other end, and now some of that same hardware is finding out the hard way.
Kelsey Lewin, who co-owns a used game store in Seattle, put it plainly to public radio this month: physical media disappearing isn’t just a movies problem anymore, it’s coming for games next. And the people who’ll feel it first are the ones who can’t afford to just rebuy everything digitally every time a platform changes its mind.
Two stories, one company, the same lesson twice in one month. If it plugs in and phones home, it was never really yours to keep.
Welcome to PM Weekly. Let’s get into the week.
THIS WEEK ON DISC
- Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa (2008), first-ever 4K, Universal
- Anyone But You (2023), Sony
- Pleasantville (1998), Collector’s Edition, Shout! Studios
- The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), Sony
- Unlawful Entry (1992), Shout! Studios
- The Black Belly of the Tarantula (1971), Celluloid Dreams
- Cruel Story of Youth (1960), Nagisa Oshima, Criterion 4K
- I’ll Remind You of Everything: The Films of Mike Mills box set, Criterion (Beginners, 20th Century Women, C’mon C’mon)
INDUSTRY WATCH
The Paramount Skydance takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery hit a real wall this week. On Monday, a federal judge froze the $110 billion deal for at least fourteen days after twelve states sued, arguing the combined company would control too much of the theatrical and cable markets. A hearing is set for August 3. This is the same deal boutique labels have been racing against since spring, licensing Warner catalog titles while ownership stayed uncertain. Shareholders approved it in April. Regulators cleared it. A judge just didn’t. Nobody knows yet who owns one of the largest film libraries on Earth, or what happens to the pipeline that’s kept Arrow, Criterion, Shout! Factory, and Vinegar Syndrome’s Iconoscope stocked with Warner titles all year.
MARKET SIGNAL
UK physical music sales accelerated in the first half of 2026, and vinyl is closing in on CD for the format lead, up 16.4 percent year over year and on pace to overtake CD in units before the year is out. It’s a reminder that the appetite driving disc collecting isn’t isolated to movies and TV. When people are given a reason to want something physical, made well, priced fairly, actually available, they still show up for it in real numbers.
STORE OF THE WEEK
VisArt (Charlotte, NC)
Run by executive director Gina Stewart, VisArt has been open since 1982, surviving four decades and multiple ownership changes to become the last video store standing in Charlotte. It went nonprofit in 2018, and today holds the largest film and video collection on the East Coast, north of 50,000 titles, including thousands of VHS tapes and hard-to-find international and regional work most people have never heard of, let alone seen. Alongside the shelves, VisArt runs a screening room and rentable community space, less a store than a working archive that happens to let you take things home.
(Next week: Movie Madness, Portland.)
THE STACK
What I pulled off the shelf this week.
Steven Spielberg: Director’s Collection (2014)
Format: DVD, 8 Discs
Bonus Features: Featurettes, trailers, deleted scenes, production photos, storyboards, and TV spots across all eight films
Universal split this set right down the middle: four crowd-pleasers everyone already owns in some form, Jaws, E.T., Jurassic Park, The Lost World, and four films that only a director’s true believer bothers to track down, Duel, The Sugarland Express, 1941, and Always. That second half is the whole reason to own this over just streaming the hits. Nobody’s putting 1941 on a curated “essential Spielberg” playlist. A box set doesn’t have that kind of amnesia, it just sits there holding the whole career, commercial flops included, until someone’s actually curious enough to reach for disc six.
SIGN-OFF
That’s Issue #3. A judge froze an $110 billion merger, Sony found a second way to remind everyone what “ownership” doesn’t mean, and somewhere in Charlotte a nonprofit video store just keeps doing the actual work. 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.
Sean Reid
Film & TV Production
seanreid@worldonetv.com
