Advertisement
Thirty discs arrived on Tuesday in a box modeled on Stanley Kubrick’s own archive. Thirteen features, three shorts, twenty-five hours of supplements, and a price that has been reported everywhere this week as five hundred and ninety-nine dollars and ninety-five cents.
Read more: Friday Blu-Ray News: ‘The Shining,’ ‘The Complete Kubrick,’ ‘Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory’ (PM Weekly Issue #16)
The word on the box is Complete. The most interesting thing about Criterion’s Kubrick set is that the man who made it will not defend that word, and does not need to.
Michael Chaiken produced this thing. He is an associate producer at Criterion and an archivist by profession. Asked about the set by The Film Stage on Tuesday, he said: “we weren’t going to call it The Definitive Kubrick because, absent Stanley, what’s definitive?” And then, a few sentences later, the line that quietly reframes the entire object: “with the exception of Lolita and Eyes Wide Shut, 4K scans already existed.”
They did. DVDBeaver’s provenance breakdown is worth reading next to the marketing copy. There is genuinely new work here: fresh Criterion masters for Killer’s Kiss, The Killing and Paths of Glory, a new scan of Lolita from the 35mm negative, and the three early shorts newly scanned in 4K from Library of Congress elements. But Fear and Desire is Kino’s 2024 restoration. Spartacus is Universal’s, from the same 6K scan Universal put on its own disc in 2020. Dr. Strangelove comes from the same Sony restoration Sony released in 2021. And 2001, A Clockwork Orange, The Shining and Full Metal Jacket are Warner’s.
Criterion never claimed otherwise. Its copy says “4K restorations presented in Dolby Vision HDR,” which is true of every disc in the box whoever made them. But the achievement being sold and the achievement being performed are not the same achievement, and Chaiken is refreshingly direct about which one this was. “These are 100% collaborations with the studio,” he told The Film Stage. And the hard part was not the studio pictures. It was the three early shorts: “the rights around that stuff was very gray,” and “it almost wasn’t a complete Kubrick because of the shorts.”
That is the thing the box actually did. Not restoring Kubrick. Assembling him, out of three studio libraries, the Kubrick estate, the Library of Congress and another label’s restoration, into one place for the first time. It is a legal achievement and a curatorial one, and both are harder than they sound.
Which brings us to the disc that justifies the whole purchase, and the sentence attached to it.
The set’s premium exclusive is the 119-minute international version of The Shining, the cut that played outside North America. DVDBeaver states it flatly: this is its North American home video debut. Fifty-six years on, and the version most of the world saw has never been sold here before. Chaiken calls it “Stanley’s final cut of that film.” Lee Unkrich recorded a commentary for it. Warner went back and restored the original blue end titles after reviewing the answer print, and put the Saul Bass Warner logo back on the front.
Here is what is missing from that twenty-five minutes. The longer meeting between Jack and Watson. The doctor who attends Danny, with her references to Tony and to the night Jack dislocated his son’s shoulder. More of Hallorann’s journey, including the garage attendant. Wendy finding skeletons in the lobby. Anne Jackson and Tony Burton are still credited on a print they are no longer in.
And here is why Kubrick cut them. The film opened badly. Jan Harlan, his brother-in-law and executive producer, has said Kubrick made the cuts because the picture was “not very well received,” that Warner Bros found it ambiguous, and that “maybe it was a bit long,” which is Harlan’s own hedge rather than a studio memo. Kubrick had already gone back once, about a week into the general run, and removed a hospital epilogue; projectionists cut the scene out of prints already in theatres and returned the trims.
So the thing now being offered as a final cut is a re-edit made under commercial pressure, by a director who was not having a good week. That does not make it less interesting. It arguably makes it much more interesting. But “final cut” and “alternate cut” are different claims about authorship, and the first one is doing work the second one would not.
Chaiken is characterising, not advertising, and nothing on Criterion’s packaging makes the claim. Nobody is being misled here. It is simply worth noticing how easily the shorter version of a film becomes the authorial one once it is the thing in the expensive box.
One last note, because it goes to how we all talk about this release. Criterion’s store sold out of the set on street date, which was widely reported. Less widely reported, and in fact not reported at all in the pieces announcing the sellout, is that Criterion ran a 50 percent off flash sale that same Tuesday, in its own words covering “all in-stock discs” for “the next 24 hours.” Billboard put the Kubrick set at $299.97 at Criterion during that sale. The set had already been discounted to $479.96 on pre-order, and Barnes & Noble still had stock at $419. Whatever sold out on Tuesday did not sell out at $599.95. Criterion’s page now reads Currently Unavailable.
Welcome to PM Weekly. Let’s get into the week.
THIS WEEK ON DISC
- The Complete Kubrick (1952-1999), 30-disc 4K UHD and Blu-ray set, Criterion
- The Silence of the Lambs (1991), 4K UHD and Blu-ray, three discs, Criterion
- Christiane F. (1981), 4K UHD and Blu-ray or Blu-ray alone, spine 1330, Criterion
- What Have You Done to Solange? (1972), 4K UHD three discs or Blu-ray two discs, Severin
- Futureworld (1976), Limited Edition 4K UHD and Limited Edition Blu-ray, Arrow
- The Pirates of Penzance (1983), 4K UHD and Blu-ray, Kino Lorber
- Bluebeard (1972), 4K UHD and Blu-ray, Kino Lorber
- A Chinese Ghost Story (1987), Limited Edition 4K UHD SteelBook, Shout
- A Chinese Ghost Story II (1990), Limited Edition 4K UHD SteelBook, Shout
- A Chinese Ghost Story III (1991), Limited Edition 4K UHD SteelBook, Shout
- Abigail (2024), Collector’s Edition 4K UHD SteelBook, Scream Factory
- The [REC] Collection, four discs, Blu-ray, Shout
- Lucky Luciano (1973), Limited Edition 4K UHD and Blu-ray, Indicator
- The Sinful Nuns of Saint Valentine (1974), Limited Edition 4K UHD and Blu-ray, Indicator
- The Monster (1977), Limited Edition Blu-ray, Radiance
- Visitor Q (2001), Limited Edition Blu-ray, Radiance
- An American Werewolf in London, 45th Anniversary Limited Edition 4K SteelBook, Universal
- Legend of the White Dragon (2026), 4K UHD and Blu-ray, Well Go USA
- Free at Heart, Blu-ray and DVD, Altered Innocence via MVD
Three notes. Criterion’s Silence of the Lambs leads with the two-channel surround track as the restoration’s audio and files the 5.1 as the alternate, which is the reverse of how every studio edition of this film has presented it. Arrow’s Futureworld carries “NASA: Science Fact and Fiction,” a 1976 short, on home video in HD for the first time, which is the kind of extra that justifies a boutique edition by itself. And Shout gave three Hong Kong catalogue titles fresh 4K negative scans and a new subtitle translation on the same day it shipped a four-disc [REC] set with no restoration or master claim anywhere in its copy.
Not on the 20th, whatever you have read. Cutter’s Way and Planet of the Vampires are 10 November; both are still pre-orders at MVD today, and the 20th was Radiance’s UK date repeated as an American one. Ryan’s Daughter was the 13th. Only the SteelBook of the American Werewolf anniversary belongs on this week’s list, because the standard edition streeted on the 6th. Vinegar Syndrome had nothing at all on Tuesday. And if you see Criterion’s new spine listed as Christian F., it is Christiane F.
Next Tuesday, the 27th: Criterion’s Frankenstein from Guillermo del Toro, Arrow’s Frighteners in a North American 4K debut alongside a four-film Hellraiser box, Severin’s Perros Callejeros trilogy, and Troma putting Surf Nazis Must Die! on 4K.)
MARKET SIGNAL
On Friday the sixteenth of October, Vinegar Syndrome opened a shop in Dinkytown, Minneapolis, a soft opening the day before Video Store Day, in an old bike shop on Fourth Street.
Ryan Emerson told Racket that week: “We also purchased the building, which was important to us.” And: “We’re not testing the market with a short-term lease.”
He wasn’t. Hennepin County has the deed, and it is the kind of document that tells you what a company actually believes rather than what it says in an interview. Vinegar Syndrome bought the building outright, in cash, for one point one million dollars, through a Minnesota company formed six weeks earlier whose registered agent is a member of its own staff and whose tax mail goes to Connecticut. No mortgage. Nothing financed. The state’s paperwork records it as an ordinary arm’s length sale at a hair over the county’s own valuation, which is to say they did not get a bargain and did not look for one.
The deed is dated three hundred and forty-seven days before the doors opened.
That is the part worth sitting with. Not the price. The gap. Somebody bought a building in Minneapolis last November and then spent the better part of a year getting a video store ready inside it, which is not a thing you do to test a market.
And it is not the first time. The Pittsburgh store on East Carson Street sits on a parcel that sold a year before that shop opened, to a corporate buyer whose tax mail goes to the storefront itself. Allegheny County strips owner names out of its published records, so I cannot put Vinegar Syndrome’s name on that one, but the sequence is identical. Buy the building. Wait the better part of a year. Open.
Remember what this company is. It is a restoration house. It scans negatives, it runs its own colour suites, and by its own count it has digitally preserved more than five hundred films. Four of its five stores have opened since 2022, and the fifth moves out of Bridgeport early next year to become Vinegar Syndrome Connecticut.
A label that leases can leave. A label that owns the freehold in two cities has made a twenty-year bet on people continuing to walk into rooms and buy objects. And because the limited editions that vanish online stay on the shelves in those rooms, the company that scans the negative is now also the company deciding who gets the scarce copies of it.
Everyone will write Video Store Day as nostalgia. The structural fact of this October is that a restoration label became a landlord.
STORE OF THE WEEK
Traumathek, Engelbertstrasse 45, Cologne.
Sixteen issues in, this column has never left North America. It should have, because the best argument for why video stores still exist is currently being made in German.
Karin Huttenhofer co-founded Traumathek in February 1994 with her then partner, and has run it alone since they split and he sold her his half. The name is not from trauma the injury. It is from Dario Argento’s Trauma, made the year before.
She opened it because the films she wanted could not be had in Cologne, or could be had only in the wrong form: dubbed, cut, or both. The uncut imports came from Holland, England and Hong Kong and ran about a hundred marks apiece, which almost nobody could afford to buy outright. So the two of them borrowed twenty thousand marks, ten from the local savings bank and ten from friends and family, and rented them to everybody else.
It still rents. A catalogue title is three euros sixty for the rest of the day plus two full days. A top title is four. Club membership is twenty-five euros a month, under a rule the shop writes as thirty, five, one: thirty films a month, five a week taken at once, one top title a day. DVD and Blu-ray are the working stock, and VHS is there for anyone who wants it, which the shop calls good old Auntie VHS. It lists no 4K at all.
At the back there is a cinema called Studio Argento, twenty-five seats by the shop’s own count, which opened in September 2016 and held its tenth anniversary screening last night. At the front there is a cafe. The whole thing is one room divided three ways.
Now the part that has no American equivalent.
Germany keeps a list of media deemed harmful to young people. A film on it is not banned, and the rules are about where and how it changes hands rather than whether. An adult can still buy one, under the counter, from a shop that does not put it on display. But an adult cannot be rented one there at all. Renting a listed title is lawful only from premises that bar minors, cannot be seen into from the street, are reachable only through their own outside door, and have their own staff and their own till. One room with one street door, open to families, can never qualify.
So Huttenhofer gave up the rental rather than the children. In 2019 she described it as the conversion of an adults-only video shop into a family video shop, with access for young people and children too, by no longer putting the indexed films out on the shelves. Note the verb. She did not slide them under the counter as a merchandising tweak. She stopped exhibiting them, which is the precise thing the law turns on, and in exchange for being allowed to let children in she gave up renting them to anybody. The shop now bills itself as expressly a family video shop, with parents warmly invited to bring the whole brood. Pornography, she notes, the big business of every normal video shop then as now, Traumathek never carried at all.
That is the trade. No American retailer has ever been offered it, because there is no American list.
What it survived is the same story everywhere else. In the eighties Germany had nearly five thousand video shops. At the end of 2024 t-online put the trade body’s most recent count at about fifty.
Traumathek nearly went under in 2017 and ran a public appeal. It needed nine thousand euros and raised nine thousand two hundred and seventy-six, from fifty-one patrons and a hundred and fourteen supporters, plus twenty-six new club members and grants from the Cologne arts office. Her own gross hourly wage the year before had been six euros.
It survived the pandemic on three things she names precisely: a good seventy club members, many of whom kept paying their monthly dues while never coming in to rent; continued arts-office money, which was for the cinema rather than the shop; and a ten thousand euro cinema programming prize from the Film- und Medienstiftung NRW, which also went to the cinema. Without those three factors, she says, they would not have made it.
In 2021 she said she wanted to hold on until the thirtieth anniversary in 2024. She made it.
Ask her about the future and she does not perform optimism. We know the Traumathek is doomed, she said in 2019. But that does not trouble us in the least. She holds with Hayao Miyazaki of Studio Ghibli, who, she says, declares smiling, confident, almost happy, that they will go under.
(Next week: Bay Street Video in Toronto.)
THE STACK
What I pulled off the shelf this week.
Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971).
Format: Blu-ray, Warner Home Video, 16 November 2010. Single layer, VC-1 at 20.76 Mbps, 1080p, 1.78:1, 99 minutes, region free. English Dolby TrueHD 5.1, which is the original mono widened out rather than a true multichannel mix. No original mono track.
Bonus Features: Audio commentary with the five Wonka kids, Peter Ostrum, Julie Dawn Cole, Denise Nickerson, Paris Themmen and Michael Bollner, recorded together. Pure Imagination: The Story of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, thirty minutes. A 1971 featurette called The Moviemakers, four minutes, on Harper Goff’s art direction. Four sing-alongs. Trailer. Everything standard definition, everything ported from the 2001 DVD.
I went looking for what the 4K added and found something stranger, which is that I have been using the same disc either way.
Warner authored exactly one Blu-ray of this film. It came out in October 2009 in a book package, came out again in November 2010 in a plain case, which is the one on my shelf, went into the 2011 anniversary gift set unchanged, and then in 2021 Warner put out a 4K and bundled it with that same disc again. Not a new encode. The same pressing, with a new label printed on it. Every US Blu-ray of this film since 2009 is twenty point seven six megabits of VC-1 struck from a master made for a DVD in 2001.
The 4K fixes two things that had been wrong for twelve years. My disc is matted to 1.78:1 when the film is 1.85:1, and it is not simply tighter, it is open-matte, with the main titles windowboxed in black on all four sides. And my disc opens with the Warner Bros shield, because the Paramount logo is not on it at all. Paramount released this film. The 4K puts that logo back for the first time on any home video edition anyone has documented. For most of this film’s life, you could not tell who put it out.
So the newer disc is better. And it is also missing twenty-six minutes you cannot get any other way.
In October 2011 Warner put out a fortieth anniversary set, numbered, limited to a hundred thousand copies, with a book and a tin and a replica golden ticket. On a bonus DVD inside it were two featurettes: Mel Stuart’s Wonka-Vision, a 2011 interview with the director, and A World of Pure Imagination, a vintage piece built around an interview with Roald Dahl himself. Neither is on the 4K. The 2024 SteelBook reissues the same two discs as the 4K combo. Neither has been reissued since, on disc or on any streaming service I can find. When that box went out of print those minutes left the market, and the only reason anyone knows they are gone is that a reviewer noticed in 2021 and wrote it down.
What the disc keeps is the apparatus: the thirty-minute documentary and the reunion commentary, both made for a DVD in 2001, which every edition since has kept porting forward out of what looks like pure inertia. Not one word of the film has been added or taken away in all those reissues.
Which is the thing I keep coming back to, because of what happened to the books. In 2022 Puffin quietly altered Roald Dahl’s texts. Augustus Gloop stopped being fat and became enormous. The Oompa-Loompas stopped being small men and became small people. Wonka stopped testing a sweet on an Oompa-Loompa and started testing it on himself. The Telegraph found hundreds of changes across five books and published them in February 2023. Michael Bollner, who played Augustus in this film and who is sitting on my commentary track, publicly objected to the loss of the word fat. Salman Rushdie posted that “Roald Dahl was no angel but this is absurd censorship.” The publisher retreated within a week and promised to keep the original texts in print.
That promise arrived on the thirtieth of January 2024 as the Roald Dahl Classic Collection, twenty titles at seven pounds ninety-nine. And the Bookseller noticed the part nobody else did, in Penguin’s own wording: the classic editions restore the pre-2022 text, but retain “some historical edits to the original texts made by Dahl in his lifetime and by his estate and publishers since his death.”
The clearest example of what that means is in this book. Dahl himself rewrote the Oompa-Loompas in 1973, from African pygmies who lived on caterpillars into small white-faced men with long flowing beards, after critics called the original racist. A historical edit by Dahl, retained. There is no edition of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in print that is the 1964 book, and the altered Puffin editions are still on sale alongside the classic ones.
The English-language film has not had a word changed. The British censors passed it at ninety-nine minutes thirty-one in 1971 and at ninety-five and a half on video in 1986 and again in 1998, which is exactly what PAL speed-up does to ninety-nine thirty-one, and the BBFC’s record notes no cuts at any of the three.
Germany is another matter, and it is why this column and the one above it belong in the same issue. The German release lost nearly all its songs. Veruca’s was removed outright and replaced with spoken dialogue. The psychedelic tunnel sequence went, and so did a shot of the swindler, because the figure was thought to resemble a Nazi. The complete version did not screen in Germany until ARTE broadcast it in August 2006, with subtitles over the passages that had never been dubbed at all. That last detail is the proof rather than the footnote: scenes with no German dub are scenes that were cut before anyone sat down to dub them.
So: what was done to the English film was done to its edges. They cropped it, took the logo off, and eventually put both back. What was done to the German film was done to its spine. What was done to the book was done to the sentences. A shop in Cologne exists because of the middle one.
THE SIGN-OFF
That is Issue #16. Thirteen features and three shorts collected in one place for the first time by a man who will not call it definitive, a shorter Shining sold as a final cut that a studio’s complaints helped produce, a restoration label that paid one point one million in cash for a building in Minneapolis and waited three hundred and forty-seven days to open the door, a video store in Cologne that gave up renting the indexed films so children could come in, and a disc from 2010 that Warner is still shipping inside its 4K box with a new sticker on it. 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
