Friday Blu-Ray News: ‘The Silence of the Lambs,’ ‘The Mandalorian and Grogu,’ ‘Baadasssss!’ (PM Weekly Issue #8)

Criterion announced its October slate with The Silence of the Lambs on 4K, and the interesting part is not the film. It is the word “upgraded.”

This is a movie that has been released on home video continuously for thirty-five years. VHS, LaserDisc, a dozen DVDs, Blu-ray, a previous Criterion edition. There is no version of the last three decades in which Silence of the Lambs was hard to find. And Criterion is doing it again, with a new restoration and new booklet essays by Willow Catelyn Maclay and Caden Mark Gardner, because the goal was never simply availability.

Read more: Friday Blu-Ray News: ‘The Silence of the Lambs,’ ‘The Mandalorian and Grogu,’ ‘Baadasssss!’ (PM Weekly Issue #8)

That is the distinction worth holding onto. Streaming solved availability, brilliantly, and then declared the problem finished. But availability is not the same as care: the right transfer, the right context, someone writing about why the thing matters, all of it fixed in an object that does not get quietly swapped for a worse master when a license renews.

The same October slate makes the point from the other direction. It brings Christiane F. to 4K, and Ngozi Onwurah’s Welcome II the Terrordome to Blu-ray following its theatrical restoration by Janus, a film most people genuinely cannot see by any means. Doing both jobs at once, rescuing what is lost and re-serving what is canonical, is the whole boutique proposition. One label, one month, both ends of the problem.

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

THIS WEEK ON DISC

• Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu (2026), SteelBook / Beskar Collector’s Edition / standard, Sony
• The Fast and the Furious (2001), 25th Anniversary SteelBook with new Dolby Vision and Atmos, Universal
• Harlan County USA (1976), Criterion
• Enemy at the Gates (2001), 25th Anniversary SteelBook, Paramount
• Body Snatchers (1993), Vinegar Syndrome
• I’m Gonna Git You Sucka (1988), Vinegar Syndrome
• Circle of Iron (1978), exclusive SteelBook, Blue Underground
• 54 (1998), Director’s Cut, Cinématographe
• Abraham’s Boys: A Dracula Story (2025), Shudder
• Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (2023), Lionsgate
• Disclosure Day (2026), SteelBook and standard, Universal
• Practical Magic (1998), Limited Edition SteelBook, first time on 4K, Warner Bros.
• United 93 (2006), 20th Anniversary Edition, Universal
• Your Name (2016), SteelBook, Shout!
• Identity (2003), Limited Edition, Arrow Video
• The Saint (1997), SteelBook, Paramount

MARKET SIGNAL

Worth reporting against our own interests. When Sony said it would stop manufacturing new PlayStation game discs in January 2028, the reaction from collectors was loud and sustained. Sony’s executives now say they have seen “no impact on our business,” and the sales data backs them up.

Circana’s figures for July 5 through August 1 show the PS5 outselling the Switch 2 in US dollar sales, trailing only in units, during the loudest stretch of the disc backlash. Overall US game spending fell 10 percent to $4.5 billion and hardware units dropped 39 percent year over year, so nothing here is booming for anyone. But the specific prediction, that abandoning discs would cost Sony its customers, has not shown up in a quarter of data.

That is uncomfortable and it is worth saying plainly. A passionate minority can be completely right about what is being lost and still not be numerous enough to register on a spreadsheet. The disc market this journal covers is real, the restorations are real, and the sell-throughs are real. But they are carried by people who care intensely, not by a mass audience about to change an executive’s mind.

Which is an argument for buying the thing rather than posting about it. Arrow’s Troy cleared most major retailers in days because people bought it, not because they were annoyed. That is the only signal that reads at this altitude.

STORE OF THE WEEK

Night Owl Video (Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY)

The store’s motto is “Death to streamers! Physical media forever!” That is not a line somebody workshopped. It is the actual thesis of the place.

Aaron Hamel and Jess Mills both moved to New York in 2012 for the independent film scene, both ended up working at Troma, and in spring 2025 they opened Night Owl on Grand Street in Williamsburg. Gothamist described the hand-painted purple and yellow interior as “an uncanny valley Blockbuster,” which is about right: vintage televisions running films and compilations, shelves of new and used Blu-ray, 4K, DVD, VHS and LaserDisc, boutique labels like Criterion and Severin alongside film books, posters and vinyl soundtracks. VHS starts around five dollars. The soft launch drew roughly 550 people and they had to reorder stock.

What separates Night Owl from most of the stores in this column is that it is not a rescue. Videodrome, Scarecrow, Beyond Video and Movie Madness all survived something. Night Owl is a bet placed in 2025, by two people in their thirties, that a storefront full of discs is a viable business in the streaming era rather than a relic of a dead one. Hamel puts the case about as simply as it can be put: “When you buy something on Blu-ray, you have it forever.”

(Next week: Vidiots, Los Angeles, CA.)

THE STACK

What I pulled off the shelf this week.

Baadasssss! (2003)

Format: DVD, 1 Disc

Bonus Features: audio commentary with Mario and Melvin Van Peebles; “The Birth of Black Cinema” featurette; The Premiere; American Cinematheque Q&A with Melvin Van Peebles; Poster Explorations; previews

Mario Van Peebles made a movie about his father making a movie, and then played his father doing it. That should be unwatchable. It is instead one of the best films ever made about how a film actually gets made, because the thing being dramatized is not artistic triumph but logistics: money that does not exist, nonunion crews and nonprofessional actors, a production that let the Screen Actors Guild believe it was shooting a porno so it would not have to hire union, and a finished picture nobody would distribute.

The film is Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, 1971, the picture that proved a Black independent film could be made and released outside the studio system and make money doing it. Everything that followed came through the door Melvin Van Peebles kicked open.

The commentary is the reason this disc stays on the shelf. Mario and Melvin sit down together, the son who made the film about the father and the father who lived it, and talk it through. There is no streaming equivalent of that, and there is not going to be one. The movie is a reconstruction of the story. The commentary is the two of them arguing gently about what actually happened, which is a different and better thing. Add the Cinematheque Q&A with Melvin and the poster gallery, and the disc functions as a small archive of an event American film history spent thirty years underrating.

That is the case for the format in one case. Not the transfer, not the resolution. The people who were there, recorded while they still could be.

SIGN-OFF

That is Issue #8. A thirty-five-year-old film getting restored again because availability was never the point, a quarter of sales data that says our side of this argument is passionate and small, and two people in Williamsburg betting a storefront full of discs still works in 2026. The honest read is that caring loudly does not move a spreadsheet. Buying the disc does. 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.

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PM Weekly 

Sean Reid

Film & TV Production

seanreid@worldonetv.com