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There is a video store in Salt Lake City that nobody has been inside since March 2020, and it is still growing.
The Tower Theatre on Ninth and Ninth opened in 1928 and has been shut since the month the pandemic arrived, which in Utah was also the month a magnitude 5.7 earthquake hit Magna, just west of the city. When the Salt Lake Film Society went in afterward they found structural problems serious enough to threaten the building’s ability to reopen at all. The façade is being taken apart right now.
Read more: Friday Blu-Ray News: ‘Road House,’ ‘Maniac,’ ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ (PM Weekly Issue #13)Downstairs from the screen there was a rental counter, and behind it an archive the Salt Lake Tribune has called the largest video and DVD collection around. In 2013 somebody counted roughly eleven thousand titles on VHS, DVD and Blu-ray, with only three or four thousand of them out on the shelves at any one time and the rest rotating up from the back. The Film Society’s then director called it the rarest collection in five states. It has been in storage for six years.
On the sixteenth of September the Film Society announced the Tower will reopen in 2028, the building’s hundredth year, with the celebration itself landing in late 2028 or early 2029. The plan has three micro cinemas in it, an exhibition space for film memorabilia, independent and festival programming, and one more line, which is the line this column cares about: improved access to the film society’s video archive.
Two days later, in the lobby of another theatre they run, they held a media swap. About sixty people came and brought discs and tapes, and went home with other people’s. The point of it was not nostalgia. It was acquisition. They are building the collection up while it sits in the dark, ahead of a reopening still two years out.
Here is the honest part, and it is the reason this is a story rather than a press release. Improved access to a video archive is not the same sentence as the video store is coming back. The Film Society’s programs director has said the collection is in storage and that they are actively exploring options to make it available to the public once again, which is a careful way to say it. Nobody at the organization has committed, on the record, to a rental counter. The number has moved too: the figure now given is about sixteen thousand titles, against eleven thousand in 2013, which either means the collection grew by five thousand in storage or that somebody has counted differently. Both are possible and neither has been reconciled in print.
What is not in doubt is that a nonprofit which could have quietly let eleven thousand discs go to a liquidator in 2020 instead paid to keep them in a room for six years, is still adding to them, and has put the archive in the plan for the building. Everything else about this is unsettled. That part is decided.
Welcome to PM Weekly. Let’s get into the week.
THIS WEEK ON DISC
- Forbidden Planet (1956), 4K UHD and Blu-ray Limited Edition, Arrow Video
- Go (1999), 4K UHD Limited Edition, Arrow Video
- Days and Nights in the Forest (1970), 4K UHD, Blu-ray and DVD, Criterion
- Three Films by Leos Carax, 4K UHD and Blu-ray collector’s set, Criterion
- Dead Poets Society (1989), 4K UHD, Touchstone
- Mrs. Doubtfire (1993), 4K UHD, 20th Century Studios
- Frankenstein: The Complete Legacy Collection, eight films on 4K UHD, Universal
- The Wolf Man: The Complete Legacy Collection, seven films on 4K UHD, Universal
- Jesus Christ Superstar (1973), 4K UHD and Blu-ray, Kino Lorber
- Bullet in the Head (1990), 4K UHD Limited Edition SteelBook, Shout! Studios
- Anthropophagous (1980), three-disc 4K UHD, Severin Films
- Absurd (1981), two-disc 4K UHD, Severin Films
- Maniac (2012), two-disc 4K UHD, Severin Films
A correction, and it is ours. Last week this column said Severin’s Maniac, the 2012 Franck Khalfoun film, was coming on October 13. It streeted Tuesday with everything else, a North American 4K premiere with a limited slipcover, and it is in stock at Severin now. Two weeks ago we caught that the listing was for the wrong film, corrected it to the right one, and then printed the wrong date for it anyway. HD Report still has it on the thirteenth.
Next Tuesday, October 6, is heavier: Little Shop of Horrors at forty with both the theatrical and the director’s cut, An American Werewolf in London at forty-five with a new restoration and a new Atmos mix, a ten-disc Aces Go Places box from Shout, Criterion’s Welcome II the Terrordome, and Kino’s Death on the Nile, which is the 1978 one and not the Branagh. Warner Archive’s Ryan’s Daughter, scanned at 8K off the 65mm negative, is either the sixth or the thirteenth depending on whether you believe Warner’s own press release or HD Report’s calendar, and we will say which once somebody has it in their hands.)
MARKET SIGNAL
Ten American subscription streaming services were phased out or folded into something else in a single quarter.
That is Parks Associates, counting the three months to the end of June, out of the roughly three hundred and seventy US services it tracks. BET+ was retired by Paramount and its library moved into Paramount+ under a BET hub. CTV Throwback and CTV Movies went into Crave. FIFA+ went into DAZN. FanDuel Sports Network shut down its television channels and its streaming operation together. RidePass is advertising-supported only now.
None of those is a scandal and most barely made the trade press. A service consolidating into a larger service is the most ordinary event in this business, and every single one of them was announced as an improvement: more in one place, simpler for subscribers, a better experience. What none of them came with was a list.
That is the whole thing. When a library moves from one service to another, somebody has to decide title by title what comes across, and the deciding factor is what it costs to carry each one. The films with clean rights and a current audience migrate. The ones with a complicated music clearance, or a co-production partner who has stopped answering, or an audience too small to justify the paperwork, are the ones at risk. Nobody publishes the difference, because publishing the difference would require admitting there is one.
Compare it to the version that did make the news. On the first of September, Sony deleted five hundred and fifty one purchased StudioCanal titles out of PlayStation libraries, with no refunds, and people were furious, correctly. That was visible because it happened to things individuals had paid for and could see vanish from an account. Ten services closing is the same loss conducted at the level of the catalogue, where there is no account page to check and no number to be angry about.
The useful question for anyone who buys discs is not whether the big deletions keep happening. It is how much goes quietly, in the ordinary course of corporate tidying, in a quarter nobody wrote about.
STORE OF THE WEEK
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Facets (Chicago, IL)
Facets has been at 1517 West Fullerton Avenue since 1977 and in existence since 1975, when Milos Stehlik started it. In a 2003 interview he credited the founding jointly with Nicole Dreiske. The first screenings were in a Lutheran church.
The rental library came later, in the eighties, which is a distinction worth making because the two things get collapsed. Facets’ own history puts it plainly: as home video emerged in the 1980s, they expanded access to cinema beyond the theatre through the videotheque, a mail order rental catalogue, VHS and DVD distribution, and the famed Facets Catalog. By their own count there are now over sixty five thousand titles, a figure which has sat in their copy for a long time and which I would attribute to them rather than state as fact. You can rent by post or in person, on Blu-ray, DVD and VHS, and you need a membership to do it.
What makes Facets worth the space this week is the structure rather than the stock. It decided fifty years ago that screening films and lending films were the same job, and then built a cinema, a rental library, a mail order operation, a distribution arm and a set of film camps for children into one building to prove it. Nobody designs that now. You get a cinema, or you get a shop, and the two run on different money.
Last week’s store was a collection that outlived the business around it, rescued by volunteers after the shop closed for good. The Tower’s archive at the top of this issue is a collection waiting in storage for a building to be made safe. Facets is the version where none of that happened, because the thing holding the collection was never a business in the first place. It is the oldest answer to the question this journal keeps asking, and the answer is that if you want a film to still be available in fifty years, the organisation that holds it probably cannot be trying to make money from it.
(Next week: Orbit DVD in Asheville, which has been on Haywood Road since 2003 and publishes the street-date calendar this column keeps checking its own work against.)
THE STACK
What I pulled off the shelf this week.
Road House (1989) Format: Blu-ray and DVD, 2 discs, MGM, June 2009 Bonus Features: audio commentary by director Rowdy Herrington; audio commentary by Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier; “What Would Dalton Do?” (12:23); “On the Road House” (17:20); trivia track
This is a bad disc and I have never gotten rid of it.
MGM put it out in June 2009 on a BD-25, encoded in MPEG-2 at an average bitrate of about eighteen megabits, which was a low number for Blu-ray in 2009 and is a shocking one now. DVDBeaver’s review is the only serious one anybody wrote and it is blunt: MGM really skimped, the disc’s producers decided this cult classic did not deserve more than an MPEG-2 encoding, there are telltale signs of noise reduction throughout, and this is not the transfer that this film deserves. The extras are all standard definition, and MGM did not even put them on the Blu-ray. They are on the DVD in the case.
It is still on the shelf because of the second commentary. Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier sat down with Road House, and the result is two men who love a film explaining, for two hours, why many film critics hated it in 1989 although it’s one of the most watchable things ever made. Hal Hinson in the Washington Post called it full of gratuitous mayhem. It got five Razzie nominations, including Worst Picture and Worst Director. Ebert gave it two and a half and said it sat right on the edge between the good-bad movie and the merely bad.
And then look at what happened to it. Shout did a Collector’s Edition in 2016 from a new 2K scan of the interpositive, supervised and approved by Dean Cundey, who shot it. Vinegar Syndrome did a 4K in late 2022 from a new scan of the original camera negative, three discs, roughly five hours of extras including a sixty-three minute making-of and five new interviews with stunt performers and supporting cast, then reissued it this May in a slipcase limited to two thousand. Arrow put out a 4K in Britain in June 2025 with Dolby Vision. Via Vision did a SteelBook in Australia in July. Four labels, four restorations, one film that everybody agreed was junk.
Now the other one. Doug Liman’s Road House, with Jake Gyllenhaal, went to Prime Video on the twenty first of March 2024. Its entire theatrical release was seventeen military base cinemas five days earlier. It drew a reported fifty million viewers worldwide in two weekends, a record for the service. Liman had published a column in January saying he would boycott his own premiere, and the line everybody quoted was this one: Amazon asked me and the film community to trust them and their public statements about supporting cinemas, and then they turned around and are using Road House to sell plumbing fixtures. He went to the premiere in the end.
There is no disc. Not a Blu-ray, not a 4K, not a DVD. Two and a half years on, blu-ray.com lists digital outlets for it and nothing else, and no label has announced one. Alliance Entertainment became Amazon MGM’s exclusive physical media distributor for North America in January, with a remit that explicitly covers catalogue revitalisation and collector editions. Road House is not named anywhere in it.
So the 1989 film, the one nominated for Worst Picture, has been scanned from the negative, restored, documented and pressed four separate times by four separate companies, and I can put my hand on a copy right now. The 2024 film, which broke a streaming record, exists only for as long as one company finds it convenient to keep serving it. The thing that saved the bad movie was that somebody could sell it to you.
SIGN-OFF
That is Issue #13. Sixteen thousand tapes in a storage unit in Salt Lake City waiting on a building that opened in 1928, ten streaming services folding into other streaming services with nobody publishing what did not make the move, a Chicago nonprofit that worked out fifty years ago that lending films and showing films are the same job, and four restorations of a film the Razzies nominated for Worst Picture against none at all of the one that broke Prime Video. 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
