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Tomorrow, video stores in four countries will sell tapes and discs that exist nowhere else. The day they are doing it on was invented by one Toronto shopkeeper on the wrong Saturday.
Read more: Friday Blu-Ray News: ‘Ryan’s Daughter,’ ‘Forbidden Planet,’ ‘Deathday’ (PM Weekly Issue #15)Daniel Hanna’s shop was then at 801 Queen Street West, directly above Rotate This. He has told the story in one sentence, in capitals, to That Shelf: “I JUST LISTENED FROM UP HERE ON RECORD STORE DAY TO WHAT THEY WERE DOING DOWNSTAIRS.” On how it got organized, to CBC: “So we set a date and just did it.” It was never only Canadian either. Hanna says year one ran in Canada, the United States, Switzerland and the UK. That year was 2011, not 2010, which is the year this column printed last week and corrects at the bottom of this issue.
Sixteen editions on, by this desk’s own count of the official directory this morning, there are 70 shops listed: fifty-nine in the United States, eight in Canada, two in Finland, one in Germany. That is our count off a live page rather than an announced figure, and it will have moved by the time you read it.
And it is worth knowing what that list actually is, because this column got burned on it two weeks ago and so has nearly everyone who has cited it. Every record carries a participation flag, and 53 of the 70 are set to false. It is a store directory with a Video Store Day flag laid over the top, not a roster of shops doing something tomorrow. This journal has now profiled fifteen stores, one an issue. Seven are in that directory. Three are flagged as taking part: Videodrome from the first issue, Night Owl Video from the eighth, and the shop in tomorrow’s Store of the Week. Scarecrow Video, CineFile Video, We Luv Video and Orbit DVD are all listed and all flagged false.
There are twelve exclusive titles tomorrow, which the official site and Eyesore’s own poster independently confirm, and exactly one of them carries a published quantity: Parasite on VHS, which the official site says is limited to a thousand copies and MVD’s own sell sheet to retailers says is seven hundred. Both of those are primary documents and they disagree.
Which is the shape of the whole thing. A sixteen-year-old international event, started by one shopkeeper on a whim, now has a store list that mostly is not a store list, a print run that is two different numbers depending on which primary document you hold, and until this week a founding year nobody had checked, including us. The day is real and it is growing. Almost everything published about it is approximate.
Welcome to PM Weekly. Let’s get into the week.
THIS WEEK ON DISC
- Maniac (2012), two-disc 4K UHD with limited slipcover, Severin
- The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016), two-disc 4K UHD with rigid slipcase, Severin
- The Black Cat (1981), three-disc 4K UHD, Severin, with a Blu-ray edition the same day
- Ryan’s Daughter (1970), 4K UHD and Blu-ray combo, Warner Archive
- The Shout (1978), Blu-ray, Criterion
- Eclipse Series 5: The First Films of Samuel Fuller, two-disc Blu-ray, Criterion
- The Last Boy Scout (1991), Limited Edition 4K UHD, Arrow, with a Limited Edition Blu-ray
- Hostel Parts I and II 20th Anniversary, five-disc 4K SteelBook collection, Shout
- The Transformers: The Movie 40th Anniversary, DVD only, Shout
- Frankenhooker (1990), 4K UHD, Synapse, with a Blu-ray
- Rollercoaster (1977), 4K UHD, Kino Lorber
- Repo! The Genetic Opera (2008), 4K SteelBook, Lionsgate Limited
- This Old Man and The Inner Voice, Remastered Collector’s Editions on Blu-ray and CD, Ruby Max via MVD
Ryan’s Daughter is the week’s event: a new 4K HDR master struck from 8K scans of the original 65mm camera negative, at 2.20:1, with a 2026 five-channel remaster alongside a five-channel restoration of the original 1970 70mm theatrical audio. It is a combo pack only. There is no standalone Blu-ray, whatever you have read, and that is our error from last week as much as anyone’s. The Transformers: The Movie turns forty and gets a DVD, which is a comment on anniversary editions all by itself. And the week’s most useful ninety seconds were spent on Criterion’s own store, which marks The Shout and the Fuller set “Released Oct 13″ while everything dated the 20th still reads “Available.”
Next Tuesday, the 20th, is the heavy one: Criterion’s thirty-disc Complete Kubrick and The Silence of the Lambs on 4K, plus Christiane F., Severin’s What Have You Done to Solange?, and Arrow’s Futureworld.)
MARKET SIGNAL
The best selling 4K disc in America two weeks ago was a film from 1956, released by a British boutique label licensing somebody else’s library.
Circana’s chart for the week ended October 3, published Wednesday, puts Arrow Video’s Forbidden Planet at number one on 4K UHD. Mrs. Doubtfire is second, Godzilla Minus One third, Dead Poets Society fourth, and Arrow’s Go, from 1999, is fifth. Not one title in that top five is a new theatrical release, and Arrow holds two of the five. Both of Arrow’s streeted in the United States on September 29, per Arrow’s own September announcement, so both were logging their first full week.
The week before, Arrow is nowhere in the 4K top twenty, which was Toy Story 5, Interview With the Vampire and Evil Dead Burn. A week after that, Toy Story 5 is out of the 4K top thirty altogether. And Circana credits the number one title to “Arrow Video/Warner,” which is the part worth sitting with: a licensee is taking Warner-held catalogue, restoring it, packaging it, and outselling the studio’s own 4K output with it.
Now the fence, because this journal has been round this particular course before. These are not units. Media Play News, which publishes the chart, defines its Index column as units sold compared to the number one title, so the ratios are sound and the magnitudes are unknowable. Forbidden Planet at 100 and Go at 54.16 tells you Go sold a bit over half what Forbidden Planet did. It tells you nothing whatsoever about how many copies either sold, and anybody who converts an index into a sales figure is making it up. The underlying data is licensed Circana VideoScan, and Circana’s public page gives ranks with no units, no dollars and no stated methodology, so there is no way to check it from outside. The same Media Play News page also carries per-title share percentages that contradict its own prose on Toy Story 5, which is why none of those numbers appear here.
What survives all that is a rank order, and a rank order is enough. The studios have spent three years explaining that catalogue on disc is a declining business for which boutique licensing is the responsible exit. Two weeks ago the exit outsold the business.
STORE OF THE WEEK
Eyesore Cinema, 1176 Bloor Street West, Toronto.
The shop that started tomorrow is still open, still renting, and currently raising money to fix its window.
Hanna opened Eyesore in 2008, moved it to Bloordale in 2016, and still owns it. It rents: catalogue titles are $3.50 for a week, new releases $4.50 for two nights, with series and box sets priced separately. It does not rent Blu-rays and it will tell you so. The rentals page refers only to DVD rental titles, and Hanna put it plainly to West End Phoenix: “We don’t rent Blu-rays.” It sells them, though, along with 4K and VHS, and all three are on tomorrow’s slate.
Ask how big the collection is and you get an honest problem instead of a number. Nobody has published a figure. The rentals page sends you instead to the shop’s Letterboxd profile, which is where it keeps what it calls a complete list of all our available DVD rental titles, and counted page by page yesterday that comes to 8,328 films. Which is Letterboxd’s films-watched counter being used by a video store as its card catalogue. So the accurate thing to say is roughly 8,300 DVD titles on the profile the shop points renters to, and the inaccurate thing to say is 8,328 films in the collection.
What is in there is cult, giallo, Cannes selections, Criterion, limited-run anime, Canadian exploitation and hard-to-find foreign film, and what is deliberately not in there is current Marvel. The recommendations are handwritten on Post-its. There is a Yor: The Hunter from the Future poster on the wall. It is a working microcinema as well as a shop, and it hosted five days of the Toronto Indie Horror Fest this month. The site’s own line is “Death To Mediocrity! Long live the Video Store!” The Letterboxd bio is better: “Toronto’s greatest video store in the history of the universe, and birthplace of Video Store Day.”
Hanna is one of the most quotable people on this beat and he has been at it long enough to have a record. To West End Phoenix in May 2024: “I don’t want to live in a world without video stores.” And, on the man who told him he would last a year, “I wish I had his phone number. Hey, it’s been 16 years, buddy.” And the one that explains why the shop is still there: “Teenagers and people in their 20s saying, Wow, a real video store, my dad told me about this. And the next week they come back with five of their friends.” To That Shelf in 2013, in capitals: “Indie video stores STARTED this business and we’re going to finish it.” To the Globe and Mail in 2015, which is the line this journal thinks about most: “It’s extremely depressing that the only time we get any attention is when we’re closing.” To CJRU in 2021, on what streaming actually holds: “maybe 10 per cent of what you will find in a well-stocked movie store.”
The shop’s own postcard for tomorrow calls it the 16th Annual International Independent Video Store Day and gives the hours as noon to midnight, with twelve exclusive hard media releases across VHS, laserdisc, DVD, Blu-ray and 4K, local zines, t-shirts and prizes, and the instruction “JOIN US WHERE IT ALL BEGAN!” Horror Express screens on Sunday.
Also launching tomorrow is the 2027 Pin-Up Calendar, featuring, in the shop’s words, local members of the community. It is thirty Canadian dollars, or two for fifty, cash or e-transfer, and the listing on Eyesore’s own storefront says what it is for in one flat sentence: “This is a fundraiser to fix our front window.” That is the only sign of difficulty anywhere in the file on this store, and it is worth saying out loud. The shop that invented the day the industry now uses to celebrate independent video retail is fixing its front window with a community pin-up calendar.
(Next week: Traumathek in Cologne, renting films since 1994, with a café at the front and a 25-seat cinema at the back. The first time this column has left North America, and the only German shop in the Video Store Day directory.)
THE STACK
What I pulled off the shelf this week.
Deathday (2017).
Format: DVD, ITN Distribution, Region 1 NTSC, 2.35:1 widescreen, Dolby Digital, not rated. The back cover reads “Approx. Runtime: 1 Hours 25 Minutes,” typo and all, under a 2017 Gas Money Pictures copyright.
Bonus Features: None. Not a menu, not a trailer, nothing.
Disclosure first, because this journal does not get to make exceptions for itself: I produced this film. My name is on the back of the case, fourth in the producer block, after Joe Bartone, James L. Bills and Kacper Skowron. Everything below that can be checked has been checked against something other than my memory, and the disc in my hand is doing more of the work than my recollection is.
It premiered in Hollywood on January 26, 2018, at the Arena Cinelounge, and it was called The Campus. The Hollywood Reporter reviewed it under that name. So did the Los Angeles Times. Neither was kind. Frank Scheck’s line in THR was that the film showed “energetic enthusiasm rather than real finesse,” which is a sentence I have thought about more than once since.
By the time it reached a disc it was called Deathday. Nothing in the film changed.
Culture Crypt, reviewing it, wrote that the film “was marketed as a ‘mockbuster’ of Happy Death Day,” and I understand completely why anyone would read it that way. The sequence is the wrong way round, though, and because I was there I am going to say so and then hand you the dates to check me with.
We shot in April and May of 2017, nights, twenty-two days, on an office location in Burbank with a cave built inside it. Dread Central came out on the twenty-first night, the last one, and ran its report on June 8. Blumhouse had announced its film the previous October, but the first trailer did not arrive until the middle of June, a week after that piece ran, and the film did not open until October 13. We were not making a response to it. We were making something called 5 Sins, after an idea Horton had found in Aztec culture that the soul comes in five pieces, which is also why the Polish release is called Diabeł zabija pięć razy, the Devil kills five times. The picture was finished before we knew the other one existed.
The re-title came afterwards and it did not come from us. It was ITN’s suggestion, and the reason was Walmart. A title that reads on a shelf beside a title people have already heard of is a title that gets stocked, and getting stocked is the entire game for a film at this level. So the name on the case is not an artistic decision and it is not really even a marketing one. It is a shelf decision, taken by a distributor, about a retailer. You are holding a piece of American retail logic with a movie attached to it.
Which is the part that makes this a column rather than an anecdote, because streaming still calls it The Campus. Tubi has it free, Amazon and Apple rent it, and all three use the premiere title. The shelf decision, the thing that actually determined what this film was called for most of the people who have ever seen it, survives in exactly one place. Take the disc down and you are holding the only copy that remembers what Walmart needed it to be. Stream it and the record is tidy again.
And there is one more disc, which I did not expect to be writing about. The only Blu-ray of this film in the world is German. Lighthouse Entertainment released both a DVD and a Blu-ray on June 21, 2019, under the title Deathday: Make a Wish… to Survive, with the original title listed as The Campus, so the German edition carries both names at once. The Blu-ray has an English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track, which makes it fully usable for anyone reading this. A US Blu-ray was announced in the trade press in January 2018, first for March and then for April, and was never pressed. So the best-looking and best-sounding edition of an American film that opened in Hollywood is an import, and it is the only one that exists.
The runtimes are a mess and the mess is instructive: 82 minutes on the German DVD, 86 on the German Blu-ray, 84 in every database, 85 on my case, 90 in THR’s credits block. There is no alternate cut. The German DVD is PAL, and 82 minutes at 25 frames against 24 is 85 and a half, which is the disc in my hand. Not two versions of a film. One film and two electrical standards.
Rotten Tomatoes has two critics on it, which is below the five it needs to calculate anything, so there is no score. Metacritic has no Metascore. Letterboxd says there are not enough ratings to compute an average. Horton’s own interviews now date his career from Craving in 2023 and do not mention this one at all. A film can get a theatrical premiere, an LA Times review, a German Blu-ray and three names, and leave no measurable trace whatsoever.
It is still on Tubi tonight, for free, under the name it had before anybody tried.
THE CORRECTIONS DESK
We printed the wrong founding year for Video Store Day, in a sentence that contradicted itself. Last week this column closed Store of the Week with “where Daniel Hanna invented Video Store Day in 2010, the day before its sixteenth edition.” Sixteen editions from 2010 would make tomorrow the seventeenth. The year is 2011, and the first Video Store Day was Saturday, October 15, 2011.
The cleanest proof is a trade item nobody has cited all year: Home Media Magazine, August 17, 2011, Erik Gruenwedel, under the subheading “Inaugural event Oct. 15 plans to showcase strength and vitality of the independent video store.” Everything contemporaneous agrees, including Hanna in Centretown News that October: “It’s our first year, so we’re really getting our legs.” And the edition count never slips a rung afterwards, from year three in 2013 to the fifth year in 2015 to the eighth in 2018 to Scarecrow Video’s 13th and 14th annual to this year’s sixteenth. Counted from 2011 every one lands. From 2010 they are all off by one.
So where did 2010 come from? MVD’s July announcement of its Video Store Day partnership states in its own body copy that “VSD was created in 2010,” and that is MVD’s copy, not Hanna’s: he is quoted in the same release on “fifteen years of organizing VSD,” which is 2011 and sixteen editions. The founder’s arithmetic was right the whole time. Downstream, Wikipedia now states 2010 and cites the official site’s about page for it, which gives no founding year at all, and Checkiday says the day has been observed “since 2010” citing the same source, which again names no year. Two thousand twenty six minus sixteen is two thousand ten. The subtraction is the source, and it does not survive its own logic: the third Saturday of October 2010 was the sixteenth, and the fifteenth is the only date any account written at the time gives.
We printed it because it was everywhere, which is exactly why a journal that sells verification should have checked it.
We corrected a right date into a wrong one, inside the Corrections Desk itself. Last week this section said Maverick: The Complete Series had moved to October 13 along with Ryan’s Daughter, “which leaves Warner Archive with nothing at all on Tuesday.” Both halves are wrong. Warner Archive’s own press release says the thirty-two disc set arrived “ON OCTOBER 6th!”, blu-ray.com’s roundup agrees, and Warner Archive therefore had the biggest television set of the month out that week. Ryan’s Daughter on the 13th stands. An error in the section whose entire job is being right is worse than an error anywhere else in the issue, and this one is ours twice: we got it wrong, then corrected something that was already correct.
The Monster Squad and Cujo were never coming out here this month. Last week we promised Arrow Limited Editions of The Monster Squad, Cujo and The Last Boy Scout for Tuesday. Only The Last Boy Scout arrived. Arrow’s October announcement was a British release: the store pages are in pounds, Region B Free, with no US option and no US date anywhere. MVD’s Arrow catalogue for the United States runs continuously from AV895 to AV933 through December 15 and contains neither title at any date. The press release’s “October 11” was the Sunday before a British Monday, which is why it read as nonsense at the time. That should have been read as a warning rather than a typo.
Ryan’s Daughter has no standalone Blu-ray. Warner Archive announced a 4K UHD and Blu-ray combo and nothing else. The separate Blu-ray we listed appears to have been invented downstream and repeated, by us among others.
Maniac: Issue #12 was right and our correction to it was wrong. We printed Severin’s Maniac for October 13, then corrected ourselves to say it had already streeted on September 29. MVD has it at October 13 and Severin has taken it off its pre-order page, so the original date was right. The title that genuinely streeted on September 29 is Anthropophagous, which is also a Severin two-disc 4K with a limited slipcover, was announced in the same window, and went up on the same day in June. We conflated them.
The method note, and it is the useful part. What led us astray was seeing Maniac in stock on Severin’s own web store at the start of the month and treating that as evidence of a street date. It is evidence of the opposite. Severin ships web store pressings ahead of the trade date, which this desk had already documented in writing about Anthropophagous in the same week and then failed to apply. A label having stock on its own site tells you about that label’s warehouse, not about Tuesday.
SIGN-OFF
That is Issue #15. A video store day invented by a shopkeeper who heard a record shop having a party under his floor, with a founding year nobody had bothered to check, including us. A 1956 film from a British boutique outselling every new 4K release in America. A Toronto video store fixing its front window with a pin-up calendar. Fifty-four films going onto celluloid this year because Congress pays for it and nobody else will. And a film I produced that got renamed for a Walmart shelf and exists in high definition in exactly one country, which is not this one.
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
