Friday Blu-Ray News: ‘The Hot Spot,’ ‘Troy,’ ‘Deep Blue Sea’ (PM Weekly Issue #7)

In 1990, Dennis Hopper walked a group of musicians into a studio and told them to play the blues.

He was scoring The Hot Spot, his sweaty little neo-noir with Don Johnson, and instead of a composer he hired legends: Miles Davis, John Lee Hooker, Taj Mahal, the slide guitarist Roy Rogers. He put them in a room together and had them play to the film. What came out, produced by Jack Nitzsche, is one of the finest things ever attached to a movie almost nobody saw. It was among the last music Miles Davis ever recorded. He was gone within the year.

Read more: Friday Blu-Ray News: ‘The Hot Spot,’ ‘Troy,’ ‘Deep Blue Sea’ (PM Weekly Issue #7)

The film disappeared. The soundtrack became a cult object, passed between people who never even watched the picture it came from. This week, thirty-six years later, Radiance restores The Hot Spot in 4K and caps it at 5,000 copies.

There is a whole category of film like this. Movies that survive because of one strange, brilliant thing buried inside them that deserves to be kept. No studio protects those. Someone who loves them has to.

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

This Week on Disc

• Troy (2004), 3-disc Limited Edition, Arrow Video
• The Hot Spot (1990), Limited Edition of 5,000, Radiance
• Nightcrawler (2014), Collector’s Edition, Shout!
• The Good, the Bad, the Weird (2008), two cuts, Arrow Video
• Popeye (1980), Dolby Vision, Paramount
• The Swan Princess (1994), Dolby Vision and 7.1 audio, Sony
• Buffet Froid (1979), Limited Edition of 4,000, Indicator
• Abandon Ship (1957), Sony
• Flight (2012), Kino Lorber
• MacArthur (1977), Kino Lorber
• Repo Men (2010), Kino Lorber
• The Island (1980), Kino Lorber
• Badland Rising (2026), Well Go USA

Market Signal

Arrow Video’s 3-disc 4K Troy went fast. Within days of its August 18 release the Limited Edition was sold out at Arrow’s own store, Barnes & Noble, Walmart and Amazon UK, with Amazon US left as the last major retailer still holding stock, per HD Report’s August 19 follow-up. A twenty-two-year-old Warner blockbuster, a Brad Pitt epic that has sat in bargain bins for years, and collectors cleared the boutique edition off most shelves inside a week.

That is the number to watch, because it is not an accident. Radiance capped The Hot Spot at 5,000 copies. Indicator capped Buffet Froid at 4,000. These labels set their runs deliberately small because they know almost exactly how many buyers are real, and the buyers keep clearing the shelf anyway. Troy is just the loudest version of a signal this market sends every week: demand for the definitive physical edition now routinely outruns the supply labels are willing to press.

There is a tension worth naming. A movie pressed in a single limited run is a movie most people cannot get once it is gone, and a sell-through like this is a sale the label only makes once. But scarcity is also the engine. It is what makes these editions viable to produce in the first place, and what turns a catalog title nobody thought about into an object people set an alarm to buy. This week, the alarm went off for Troy.

Store of the Week

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The Video Store MPLS (Minneapolis, MN)

Every store we have featured so far was a rescue, a shop saved from closing or a collection kept out of the dumpster. The Video Store MPLS is the opposite: a video store being born, right now, in 2026, out of nothing.

Founder Eric Knobel’s pitch is almost stubbornly simple, to “preserve and archive every single movie we can get our hands on, from the classic greats to the objectively terrible.” It started as a reaction to the exact frustrations this journal keeps naming: titles vanishing from streaming, prices climbing, ads landing where they should not. “I paused something the other day because I wanted to look at the frame,” Knobel said, “and an ad came up instead.” So he started buying, and taking donations. The collection is already past 3,000 titles, with hundreds arriving in a matter of weeks, on the way to a target of roughly 10,000 before the doors even open.

There are no doors yet. No storefront secured, which is the honest, unglamorous stage most of these stories skip past. What there is instead is a monthlong crowdfunding push launching this August, with a kickoff screening at the Trylon and a closing night at Strike Theater, a shop trying to exist by asking a city whether it still wants one. On the evidence of every other store in this column, the answer is usually yes.

(Next week: Video Free Brooklyn, Brooklyn, NY.)

The Stack

Deep Blue Sea (1999)

Format: Blu-ray (2010 Warner release), 1 Disc

Bonus Features: audio commentary with director Renny Harlin and Samuel L. Jackson; two behind-the-scenes featurettes, “When Sharks Attack” and “Sharks of the Deep Blue Sea”; five deleted scenes with optional director commentary; theatrical trailer.

Renny Harlin’s shark movie should not work as well as it does. The premise is nonsense. Scientists on an isolated sea lab enlarge mako shark brains to cure Alzheimer’s, and the sharks get smart enough to fight back. The movie is completely unembarrassed about it, and that is the point. It commits. It gives you Thomas Jane and Saffron Burrows and Stellan Skarsgard and LL Cool J with a parrot, and then, in the single most famous thing it ever did, lets Samuel L. Jackson deliver a rousing hold-it-together speech and eats him mid-sentence. Audiences have never stopped talking about that cut.

Here is why it earns a spot on the shelf. Streaming gives you the movie. The disc gives you Renny Harlin and Samuel L. Jackson sitting down to talk through how they built it, the deleted scenes that never made the cut, the featurettes on how the sharks were pulled off. That is the part the licensing carousel never carries. A big, loud, perfectly built studio popcorn movie is worth owning for the movie alone, the kind you actually rewatch, but the commentary and the cut footage are the things you cannot get any other way once the stream moves on. The disc does not care what quarter it is. It just plays, extras and all.

Sign-off

That is Issue #7. A Dennis Hopper movie almost nobody saw, kept alive by a soundtrack too good to lose. Thirteen new titles on shelves Tuesday, one of them selling out at most stores within days. And a brand-new video store in Minneapolis trying to exist out of donated tapes and stubbornness. Whatever else is disappearing, somebody keeps deciding these movies are worth keeping. 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