Friday Blu-Ray News: ‘The People Vs. Larry Flynt,’ ‘Little Fockers,’ ‘Safe’ (PM Weekly #5)

Video Store Day turns sixteen this year. Daniel Hanna started it in 2010 as a grassroots way to get independent video stores rallying around one day the way record shops do every April. Sixteen years later, on October 17th, it’s got a real distributor behind it for the first time. MVD Entertainment Group, thirty-five years in the business, still family-owned, just signed on as an official partner, promising exclusive Blu-ray, 4K, DVD, and even VHS variants sold nowhere but through participating independent stores.

Read more: Friday Blu-Ray News: ‘The People Vs. Larry Flynt,’ ‘Little Fockers,’ ‘Safe’ (PM Weekly #5)

Hanna called it fifteen years of running Video Store Day as “a grassroots event,” now finally with a distributor’s backing. Fifteen years of doing this without one, just stores and volunteers and word of mouth, and it still built something worth a company the size of MVD showing up to help carry.

Record Store Day had it easier. Vinyl never really stopped being manufactured; it just went quiet for a while. Video stores watched their entire format get discontinued out from under them, and kept going anyway. Sixteen years of survival, on the format that wasn’t supposed to make it, just landed its first real distribution partner.

Products get announced in August. First MVD-backed exclusives ever. Mark the date.

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

THIS WEEK ON DISC

• Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006), 20th Anniversary SteelBook
• American Pie 2 (2001)
• Creepshow 2 (1987), Special Edition, Arrow Video
• Little Fockers (2010)
• Night of the Comet (1984), SteelBook, Shout!
• School on Fire (1988), Shout!
• Safe (1995), Todd Haynes, Criterion
• The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996), Arrow Video

INDUSTRY WATCH

Two studios just lost separate control of their own discs. Conectiv Supply Chain Solutions acquired Studio Distribution Services this week, the joint venture Universal and Warner Bros. Discovery set up back in 2021 to handle their own DVD, Blu-ray, and 4K sales and distribution. Conectiv also picked up exclusive, long-term licensing agreements to run both studios’ physical home entertainment businesses going forward, folding disc and vinyl manufacturing, fulfillment, and distribution under one company for the first time. Conectiv’s CEO called it “the industry’s most comprehensive packaged-media platform.” That’s not marketing spin, it’s an accurate description of what just happened: two of the biggest libraries in the business now depend on a single third party to keep their discs made and shelved. Warner Bros.’ own head of transactional sales insists nothing changes for consumers or retailers. Maybe. But it’s worth noticing how much of this industry’s physical backbone just moved under one roof in a single afternoon.

MARKET SIGNAL

Not every game publisher is reading Sony’s exit from physical the same way. Sega’s president told Famitsu this week that the company has no plans to stop making physical games, pointing to what he called the “culture of physical media,” even while agreeing that digital makes sense for most full console and PC titles. Meanwhile, Ubisoft’s CEO said on an earnings call that he doesn’t think Sony’s move will “disturb the industry too much.” One company is quietly signaling it’ll keep making discs regardless of what Sony does. Another is shrugging like the whole question barely matters. That gap is the real story: physical gaming’s future isn’t actually settled industry-wide, it just looks that way when Sony’s the only one making headlines.

STORE OF THE WEEK

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Free Blockbuster network

Not a store this time, a movement. Free Blockbuster started as a grassroots “take a disc, leave a disc” project: volunteers repurpose old newspaper boxes and cabinets, paint them in Blockbuster’s old blue-and-yellow, and stock them with DVDs anyone can take, no membership, no late fees, no app. Boxes have spread to dozens of cities, entirely community-run, entirely free. It’s the opposite model of everything else this feature has covered so far, no shelves, no staff, no single address, just physical media kept in circulation because enough people decided it should be.

(Next week: Beyond Video, Baltimore.)

THE STACK

What I pulled off the shelf this week.

Tennis, Anyone? (2006)

Format: DVD, 1 Disc

Bonus Features: Deleted Scenes, Cast Interviews, Director’s Notes & Commentary, Hidden “Easter Eggs”

This one’s proof that DVDs preserved a whole tier of movie that streaming never bothered archiving. Donal Logue directs and stars as a washed-up actor chasing relevance through celebrity tennis, with a cast that reads like a “spot the future star” game: Paul Rudd in a small role years before he was Paul Rudd, plus Stephen Dorff, Danny Trejo, and Jason Isaacs filling out the supporting bench. The commentary track and cast interviews are the kind of extras a movie this small would never get again if it were made today, nobody’s licensing this for a streaming platform, let alone paying for new bonus content. The DVD isn’t just how you watch it. It’s the only reason any of that material exists at all.

SIGN-OFF

That’s this week. Video Store Day just landed its first real distributor after sixteen years of doing it alone. Two studios just handed their entire physical backbone to a single company in one afternoon. And somewhere out there, a repainted newspaper box wearing a dead company’s colors is quietly keeping discs in circulation anyway. Physical media doesn’t move in one direction. 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

Sean@WorldOneTV.com