Friday Blu-Ray News: ‘The Crowd,’ ‘Little Shop of Horrors,’ ‘Walk Hard’ (PM Weekly Issue #14)

In 1989 the Library of Congress picked the first twenty-five films for the National Film Registry. That list had to prove the whole idea, so it was stacked: Citizen Kane, Casablanca, The Best Years of Our Lives, Sunrise, Snow White. And King Vidor’s The Crowd, from 1928.

In the thirty-seven years since, The Crowd has never had an authorized American release on DVD or Blu-ray. It missed the entire disc era.

Read more: Friday Blu-Ray News: ‘The Crowd,’ ‘Little Shop of Horrors,’ ‘Walk Hard’ (PM Weekly Issue #14)

That ends on the eighth of December. Flicker Alley announced last Friday that it is putting the film on Blu-ray in a new restoration from Blackhawk Films, all-region, made possible, in the label’s words, through the generous support of the Sunrise Foundation for Education and the Arts. David Mackenzie of Fidelity in Motion authored the disc. Three accompaniments come with it: a piano composition by Antonio Coppola, an orchestral score by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra, and a xylophone accompaniment by Illya Amar.

The gap is the story. There was an MGM VHS in the 1980s, in the Silent Classics line with a Carl Davis score, and a laserdisc that double-billed it with The Wind. Then the format changed and the film did not come with it. Silent Era keeps an edition history, and what fills the last three decades is grey-market and foreign DVDs out of Hong Kong, Spain, France and England, plus a US DVD-R this year the reviewer believes was struck from pirated files. A film in the inaugural class of the national registry, and the way Americans have owned it since the laserdisc died is an import or somebody’s burn.

There is a joke in here that is not really a joke. The Crowd is about a man named John Sims who arrives in New York certain he is going to be somebody, and spends ninety-eight minutes becoming nobody in particular. Vidor used hidden cameras for some of the New York scenes so the people on the street would not perform. The shot everyone remembers finds Sims at one desk among hundreds, identical and numbered, and it is the shot Billy Wilder borrowed thirty-two years later to introduce Jack Lemmon in The Apartment. A film about disappearing into an undifferentiated mass spent a generation circulating as an unlabelled copy of itself.

What makes this worth leading with rather than listing is that the disc puts the absence on the record instead of papering over it. One extra is a 2026 piece called The Paths of The Crowd, about the film’s deleted sequences and alternate endings, which is to say about the parts of it that are gone now. There is also a new visual essay, a Kevin Stoehr commentary, Robert Florey’s Skyscraper Symphony from 1929 out of the George Eastman Museum collection, and a booklet by Jordan Young, who wrote a book about the making of the film. That is a release built by people who know exactly how long this took.

One caution, and it is the kind this journal exists to make. Flicker Alley’s copy says the film “comes to home entertainment for the first time in a brand-new restoration from Blackhawk Films.” Read one way, that sentence claims the film has never been on home video at all, and the VHS and the laserdisc say otherwise. Read the other way it only claims this is the first time in this restoration, which is fine. The accurate thing to say is that this is the first authorized American edition on a digital disc. Smaller claim. Still a thirty-year wait.

Flicker Alley also does not state the resolution, the source elements, or which archives supplied them. So nobody should write “4K scan of the negative” until somebody says so.

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

THIS WEEK ON DISC

• Halloween (1978), Limited Edition 4K UHD SteelBook, Scream Factory
• Halloween II (1981), Limited Edition 4K UHD SteelBook, Scream Factory
• Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982), Limited Edition 4K UHD SteelBook, Scream Factory
• Child’s Play 2 (1990), Limited Edition 4K UHD SteelBook, Scream Factory
• Aces Go Places Collection (1982-1989), five films, ten discs, Shout! Factory
• Little Shop of Horrors (1986), 40th Anniversary 4K UHD, theatrical and director’s cut, Warner Bros.
• An American Werewolf in London (1981), 45th Anniversary 4K UHD, Universal
• Welcome II the Terrordome (1995), Blu-ray, Criterion
• Moana (2026), 4K UHD, Walt Disney
• Van Helsing (2004), Limited Edition 4K UHD SteelBook, Universal
• Disclosure Day (2026), Limited Edition 4K UHD SteelBook, Universal
• Blades of the Guardians: Wind Rises in the Desert (2026), 4K UHD, Well Go USA
• Iron Maiden: Burning Ambition (2026), Limited Edition 4K UHD SteelBook, Universal
• Wizard of Oz: Dead Walk, DVD, Shout! Factory

(Next Tuesday is heavier: Ryan’s Daughter from 8K scans of the 65mm negative, the thirty-two-disc Maverick, Criterion’s The Shout, and Arrow Limited Editions of The Monster Squad, Cujo and The Last Boy Scout.)

MARKET SIGNAL

On Tuesday, Paramount closed its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. The combined company began trading as Skydance, WBD came off Nasdaq the same day, and the release announcing it described the result as “the most diverse film and television library of any studio.”

The words home entertainment do not appear in that release. Neither do physical, Blu-ray, DVD or archive.

That is worth noticing, but on its own it is an absence, and absences make bad arguments. What makes it a signal is what happened eight weeks earlier, which almost nobody on this beat connected at the time.

On the fourth of August, Universal and Warner Bros. sold Studio Distribution Services to Conectiv Supply Chain Solutions, a disc manufacturer owned by Variant Equity. SDS was the joint venture the two studios formed in January 2020 to merge their physical distribution into one operation, and it was the thing that actually moved every Universal and Warner DVD, Blu-ray and 4K in North America: sales, retail marketing, distribution, the whole pipe. Conectiv did not only buy the operation. It also took exclusive long-term licenses to run both studios’ physical home entertainment businesses going forward.

So put the two in order. In August, two of the six majors handed their disc business to a contract manufacturer under license. In October, one of those two was absorbed into a company that did not exist in its current shape in September, and the documents never mentioned discs.

This is what consolidation actually looks like from down here. It is not a studio announcing it has stopped making Blu-rays, because nobody will ever announce that. It is the slow separation of the people who own films from the people who put films in boxes, until the box business is a service contract between two parties, neither of whom has any particular reason to care which titles get pressed.

The counterweight is real, because this journal has spent four months arguing that the disc business is healthier than the obituaries say. Alliance Entertainment’s physical movie revenue rose 22 percent to $339 million in the fiscal year ended June, in filed numbers, during a half-year when American consumers’ disc spending fell 6.9 percent. Both are true at once, and they are the same fact seen from two ends. Volume is holding up. It is just consolidating into fewer pipes, owned by companies whose business is logistics rather than cinema.

One more line is worth sitting with. The consent decree that cleared the merger is specific and itemized about production: thirty theatrical films a year for two years and thirty-two a year for three after that, $300 million a year in domestic production, a workforce fund, a news independence board, and a thirty-million-dollar penalty attached to missing the film target. Twelve state attorneys general and the Writers Guild negotiated protections for films that have not been made yet.

They negotiated nothing for the ones that already exist. The library is not mentioned. Catalogue licensing is not mentioned. Preservation is not mentioned. It would be unfair to call that a failure, because nobody asked for it. It is a statement about what the public interest in a studio merger is currently understood to cover, and right now that does not include the hundred thousand hours already in the vault.

STORE OF THE WEEK

Orbit DVD (Asheville, NC)

Orbit DVD opened on the thirteenth of October, 2003, in a thousand square feet on the corner of Haywood Road and Mildred Avenue in West Asheville, next door to a record shop called In Your Ear Music Emporium. It has never moved. In 2006 it took the record shop’s space and knocked down the wall, which got it to the 2,400 square feet it has now, and around 2010 Marc McCloud, who founded it and still owns it, bought the building. Its twenty-third birthday is next Tuesday.

This column teased Orbit last week on the grounds that it publishes the street-date calendar this desk keeps checking its own work against. That is true, and the truth is better than the tease.

The calendar is a third-party Shopify app. It is called The Shop Calendar, it costs about ten dollars a month, and Orbit switched it on at the start of August. Nobody compiles it and no editor is credited, because there isn’t one. Every entry is a product record with a street date on it, dropped automatically onto a grid. It runs twelve weeks forward and thins fast: 228 dated entries in August, eighty-one in October, five in December, nothing in 2027. It is a pre-order book, not a release calendar.

And it has been right when we were wrong. It put Magic on 29 December, which is where this column landed it last week against JoBlo. It put Mannaja on 15 December, matching the correction in Issue #12. A video shop in Asheville running a ten-dollar widget agreed with this desk twice in a row while three national aggregators did not.

The honest limit: UK and Region B titles sit on their own Monday dates, which is more careful than most American calendars manage, but region-free UK SteelBooks do land mixed into the US Tuesdays. Of eleven entries on the sixth of October, four were UK-sourced. These are the dates Orbit expects to have a specific item in hand, which is not the same as a trade street date, and that distinction is the reason it is useful.

Orbit is not a rental store, which matters because it keeps getting written up as a rental survivor. Rentals ended in 2020, confirmed on Orbit’s own About page and by the Mountain Xpress piece that says it went to a hundred percent sales model after the COVID closures. The student paper at UNC Asheville got the reason on the record a year later: rentals were about three percent of sales, and the growing games section had taken the back room where the rental cases lived. The Better Business Bureau still files Orbit under Video Tape Rentals, which is probably where the confusion starts.

McCloud has a motto and it is printed on his own About page in capitals. ADAPT OR DIE. He said it to Mountain Xpress in 2023, along with the thing that goes with it: “I outlasted all of them.” He also said the quieter part. “People think that physical media is dying, and it is if you look at the grand scope of things.” To WLOS a year earlier he put it better than anyone has since: “I like calling it collecting dead media.”

(Next week: Eyesore Cinema in Toronto, where Daniel Hanna invented Video Store Day in 2010, the day before its sixteenth edition.)

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THE STACK

What I pulled off the shelf this week.

Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007)

Format: Two-disc Unrated Special Edition DVD, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 8 April 2008

Bonus Features: both the theatrical version (96 minutes) and “American Cox: The Unbearably Long, Self-Indulgent Director’s Cut” (120 minutes); audio commentary with director Jake Kasdan, writer-producer Judd Apatow, executive producer Lew Morton and John C. Reilly; sixteen full song performances (41:22); ten deleted and extended scenes (19:23); Line-O-Rama (6:22); “A Christmas Song from Dewey Cox”; “Cox Sausage Commercial with Outtakes”; song demos performed by the songwriters themselves; “Tyler Nilson: A Cockumentary”; “Bull on the Loose”; “The Music of Walk Hard” (16:42); “The Making of Walk Hard” (15:03); “The Real Dewey Cox” (14:03); “The Last Word with John Hodgman” (25:58)

It cost thirty-five million dollars and took twenty and a half worldwide, then did a reported $15.7 million on DVD by 2010. In 2008 a flop could still be half-rescued by a shelf.

The reason it is still on mine is the twenty-four minutes.

American Cox is not an alternate ending or a handful of restored scenes. A shot-by-shot comparison counts seventy-six individual changes, thirty-six of them alternative takes, nineteen recuts, and four places where the theatrical version actually has footage the longer one drops. On the Blu-ray both cuts play off the same disc side through seamless branching, with a pop-up marker telling you when you are in new footage, which was a very 2008 way to solve a problem and is still better than making you buy two copies.

I went looking this week to see whether that version has escaped the disc in eighteen years. Every digital storefront and streaming service I could find lists ninety-six minutes and an R rating, which is the theatrical cut. Tubi, Pluto, Amazon, Apple: all ninety-six. None of them, as far as I can determine, has ever offered the hundred-and-twenty-minute version. I will not say it is impossible to see any other way, because absence of evidence is not a confirmed negative and this desk has been caught on that before. What I will say is that I could not find it, and the only copy I am certain of is the one in the case.

There is a second disappearance here. The Blu-ray was one of Sony’s first BD-Live titles, and the downloadable extras were three mini-featurettes with Bill Hader playing a “Coxologist” named Derek Stone. They lived on a server. They are not on the disc, the server is gone, and so are they. The 2024 Mill Creek SteelBook reissue dropped three more extras, so the 2008 Sony release remains the only complete edition that has ever existed.

The film itself has quietly gotten better since nobody went to see it. Metacritic had it at 63 and Ebert gave it three stars, but it landed in the culture as a flop the critics had buried. Rotten Tomatoes now has it at 75 percent across 138 reviews, and Rolling Stone put it sixth on its list of the best comedies of this century. The songs took Golden Globe and Grammy nominations, and Reilly sang every one of them himself.

And the thing everybody says about it is not quite true, which is the other reason I keep the disc. The received wisdom is that Walk Hard killed the straight music biopic. Reilly’s own version, from a 2019 oral history, is funnier and more accurate: “Oh, we tried to kill the musical biopic with this movie. And it turns out it’s a very resilient cliché.” James Mangold, who directed Walk the Line and is therefore the actual target, was asked again in 2024 while promoting A Complete Unknown, and refused the premise outright. He found the film hilarious, he said, and then: “I also never understood why satire would negate making the real thing anymore. That seems a little ludicrous to me.” The only filmmaker on record saying Walk Hard constrained him is Eric Appel, who had to design Weird: The Al Yankovic Story around it, because you cannot make the same parody twice.

So the parody did not kill the genre. It killed the easy version of the parody, and then sat on a shelf for eighteen years holding twenty-four minutes nobody else has.

THE CORRECTIONS DESK

Ryan’s Daughter is the thirteenth, not the sixth, and we leaned the wrong way. Last week this column printed the date as disputed, Warner Archive’s press release on the sixth against HD Report’s thirteenth. The release went out in two versions. One copy reads “ON OCTOBER 6th!” and another reads “ON OCTOBER 13th!”, and the thirteenth is the one that held: blu-ray.com is counting down to it and it is still a pre-order today. HD Report had it right. Maverick: The Complete Series moved with it, which leaves Warner Archive with nothing at all on Tuesday.

“This Old Man” is American, and we called it Canadian. Last week we corrected Physical Media News for listing it as a 6 October US release, and said it was a Canadian disc from Ruby Max dated the thirteenth. MVD’s distributor record says Ruby Max, territory WORLD, street date 13 October. The original date was wrong and our correction to it was wrong in the other direction.

Three open items closed. Magic is confirmed for 29 December on Shout’s own store, which settles the move we flagged. The Addiction on Arrow is a phantom: that Limited Edition streeted in December 2024 and what is in stock is discounted catalogue. The Cable Guy SteelBook, which Sony announced for the sixth, is still a pre-order at several US retailers today, so it has become the twentieth without anyone saying so.

THE SIGN-OFF

Two things this week that are the same thing.

A silent film in the first class of the National Film Registry sat out the entire disc era, and a label with no studio behind it is fixing that in December. A comedy that lost money in 2007 holds a version of itself that eighteen years of digital distribution has never bothered to carry.

Neither is a story about nostalgia. They are both about the same gap: the difference between what exists and what is available, and who closes it. Studios do not close it. Streaming services demonstrably do not close it. It gets closed by Flicker Alley, by a shop on Haywood Road running a ten-dollar calendar app, by whoever at Sony in 2008 decided the long cut was worth the authoring.

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