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Arrow Films has started a label aimed squarely at people who are not us.
Toy Robot Video launches this month as an Arrow Films subsidiary, announced back in June and shipping its first discs now. The pitch is unusually direct: more mainstream than Arrow Video, cheaper than Arrow Video, built to feel like browsing a video store rather than shopping a boutique catalogue. The opening slate is Guyver: Dark Hero and Roaring Fire next Tuesday, then a two-disc 4K of Masters of the Universe and something called Marshmallow on the fifteenth, with Ninja Wars at the end of the month. Remastered transfers, OBI strips, slip cards, art cards, at prices designed not to hurt.
Read more: Friday Blu-Ray News:’Toy Robot Video,’ ‘Guyver: Dark Hero,’ ‘Ninja Wars'(PM Weekly Issue #9)The label’s own copy says it will “celebrate film and entertainment in all its forms to both new and nostalgic audiences alike,” while keeping Arrow’s “commitment to premium curation and presentation.” Mike Hewitt, speaking for it, described it as “intended to be a fun and inclusive label,” meant to “spread the joy of physical media ownership” to younger buyers and to people who were never cult film enthusiasts in the first place.
Read that as a market signal, because it is one. Boutique labels have spent fifteen years perfecting a model built on scarcity and expertise: limited runs, deep supplements, prices that assume the buyer already knows why the film matters. It works. Last issue covered the data showing exactly how narrow it is. Toy Robot is Arrow putting real money behind the opposite proposition, that the audience for owning movies is considerably larger than the audience for collecting them, and that you reach it with Masters of the Universe at a fair price rather than a numbered edition of something difficult.
There is a version of this that is cynical, and it is worth naming. A cheaper line with thinner supplements is also a higher-margin line, and “accessible” is what every company says when it means “we found a way to spend less.” Note that Arrow gets there first, promising premium curation in the same breath as accessibility, which is exactly what you would say if you knew that objection was coming. But Arrow of all labels does not need a budget imprint to survive, and the titles they have chosen are not the obvious cash grabs. Guyver: Dark Hero and Ninja Wars are not sitting on anybody’s most-wanted list.
If they are right, it is the most consequential thing to happen to this format in a while. Every argument this journal makes about ownership runs into the same wall eventually: the people who already agree are a small and finite group. Somebody finally trying to make the wall bigger is worth paying attention to.
Welcome to PM Weekly. Let’s get into the week.
CORRECTIONS
Issue #7 listed The Hot Spot as an August 18 release and led with it arriving that week. It streets today, September 1. Issue #4 listed A Bay of Blood as a July 28 release; Severin put it out on November 28, 2025.
Same cause both times. The release calendar carries titles forward across consecutive monthly listings, so an old disc keeps resurfacing as news, and neither date was checked against the label. From now on they will be.
THIS WEEK ON DISC
- 28 Days Later (2002), Limited Edition SteelBook, Sony
- The Hot Spot (1990), Limited Edition of 5,000, Radiance
- Tekkonkinkreet (2006), 2-disc 4K UHD and Blu-ray set, GKIDS
MARKET SIGNAL
The merger this journal has tracked since Issue #1 has quietly stopped being an argument about market share and become an argument about who can afford to keep arguing.
In mid-August, Paramount asked the court to require the state attorneys general suing to block its Warner Bros. Discovery acquisition to post a bond of $1.88 billion. The reasoning is that delay is expensive. Paramount owes WBD shareholders roughly $7 million a day in ticking fees for every day the deal stays open, and it wants the states carrying that cost if their suit ultimately fails. This month the attorneys general and the Writers Guild filed in opposition, telling the court that Paramount is trying to pull a fast one.
Strip out the legal machinery and the move is simple enough. If a company can attach a nine-figure price tag to the act of challenging it, then whether a merger is lawful starts to get settled by which side can afford the bond rather than by the trial. Whatever you think of this particular deal, that is a mechanism worth watching, because it works exactly the same way regardless of who happens to be right.
For this journal the stake is narrower and more concrete. Warner’s catalogue is the vault that Arrow, Criterion, Vinegar Syndrome’s Iconoscope and most of the labels in this column license against. Every month the ownership question stays open is another month of uncertainty about who controls the films they want to restore, and boutique labels plan their slates a year out. A bond fight is not usually a physical media story. This one sets how long that uncertainty runs.
STORE OF THE WEEK
Vidiots (Eagle Rock, Los Angeles, CA)
Patty Polinger and Cathy Tauber opened Vidiots in Santa Monica in 1985, and for thirty-two years it was the video store other video stores measured themselves against. Then Santa Monica rents did what Santa Monica rents do. The shop closed in 2017 and fifty thousand titles went into storage.
Most collections that go into storage do not come back out. This one did. Vidiots had become a 501(c)3 nonprofit in 2012, which turned out to be the decision that saved it, and on June 1, 2023 it reopened inside the Eagle Theatre in Eagle Rock, a 1929 movie house that had been sitting mostly dark. More than $2.4 million in donations paid for the relaunch and the theater rehabilitation.
What reopened is not really a video store. It is close to eleven thousand square feet containing a 271-seat theater running 35mm and DCP, a smaller MUBI microcinema, a bar serving beer and wine, and a rental library that has grown from the fifty thousand rescued titles to roughly seventy thousand across DVD, Blu-ray and rare VHS. It is open seven days a week. It turned forty last year.
The lesson Vidiots keeps teaching is the one Beyond Video and Movie Madness teach too, and it is not a romantic one. Every video store that survived the last decade in America survived by becoming something other than a business that rents tapes. Nonprofit status, a theater, a bar, a membership, a donor base. The affection alone was never going to be enough. The affection plus a 501(c)3 was.
(Next week: Kim’s Video, New York, NY, and the documentary about how 55,000 films came back from Sicily.)
THE STACK
What I pulled off the shelf this week.
Extra Ordinary (2019)
Format: Blu-ray, 1 Disc
Bonus Features: “Extra Ordinary: The Making of a Supernatural Comedy” featurette; theatrical trailer
Rose is a driving instructor in small-town Ireland who can talk to the dead and would very much rather not. Martin is a widower whose late wife still nags him, out loud, from beyond. Christian Winter is a washed-up one-hit rock star, played by Will Forte at full commitment, attempting a Satanic pact to reignite a career that peaked decades ago. Maeve Higgins and Barry Ward play the two leads like people who are tired rather than haunted, which is the whole trick of the film.
Mike Ahern and Enda Loughman’s supernatural comedy came out of SXSW in 2019, got a small theatrical run, and landed on Blu-ray from Cranked Up Films in June 2020, which is to say it arrived in the worst possible month in the history of small films finding audiences. Almost nobody saw it. The people who did tend to become slightly evangelical about it.
The disc is modest. One making-of featurette, a trailer, a clean 2.39:1 transfer with a DTS-HD 5.1 track. No booklet, no essay, no numbered slipcase, nothing to collect. And I want to be straight that this is the point of including it in a week led by Arrow launching a label for people who do not buy numbered slipcases.
Not every film needs the deluxe treatment. Some of them need to exist, findably, at a price a person will pay on a whim, because the alternative is that a small Irish comedy with no franchise and no awards campaign simply evaporates when whichever service currently has it decides it is not earning its shelf space. Extra Ordinary is never going to get a 4K restoration. It does not need one. It needs to be on a disc, so that in fifteen years somebody can still hand it to a friend and say, trust me on this one.
SIGN-OFF
That is Issue #9. A boutique label betting that the audience for owning films is bigger than the audience for collecting them, a merger fight that has turned into an argument about who can afford to keep arguing, and a Los Angeles institution that came back from storage because somebody had the foresight in 2012 to make it a nonprofit. Three titles on shelves Tuesday, the thinnest week this column has covered, and two corrections worth making in public. 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
