Advertisement
PM Weekly, Issue #1. One company is preserving cinema forever. The other just killed the disc.
We’re a new, independent newsletter covering the fast-growing world of physical media. Let’s start our journey with a “complete” and fascinating “odyssey” into one of cinema’s most revered filmmakers.
Read more: PM Weekly Issue #1: ‘The Complete Kubrick,’ ‘Falling Down,’ ‘The Elephant Man’I am going to tell you upfront that I want this one, so weigh everything that follows accordingly.
This week, Criterion announced The Complete Kubrick. Every film Stanley Kubrick has ever directed, thirteen features and three shorts, restored in 4K and gathered into a single thirty-disc box for the first time. It arrives October 20th and costs six hundred dollars. The box itself is modeled on the archive Kubrick built for his own work, the hand-designed boxes he used to keep every photograph, every note, every frame in its place.
That detail is the whole story, because Kubrick understood something most of the industry is busy forgetting: a film is not safe just because it exists somewhere. It has to be kept.
The same week Criterion committed to keeping Kubrick forever, Sony announced it is done with the disc. Starting in 2028, every new PlayStation game will be digital only. No box, no shelf, nothing to hand down, just a license that lives on a server until the day it doesn’t. The company that put the game disc on the map in 1994 is now quietly walking it to the door.
So there is your week, in two announcements. One company spending two years and every resource it has to make sure a body of work can be held, owned, and passed on. Another deciding that owning things is a phase we are all supposed to be growing out of.
I know which side I am on. I want the Kubrick box, partly because a future that quietly deletes the shelf is a future worth arguing with. Welcome to PM Weekly. Let’s get into the week.
THIS WEEK ON DISC
- The Elephant Man (1980). David Lynch’s stark black-and-white masterpiece comes to 4K from Criterion.
- The Evil Dead: 45th Anniversary. Sam Raimi’s low-budget horror landmark arrives in a new 4K edition.
- Stranger Things: The Complete Series. Arrow’s 25-disc 4K deluxe box gives the Netflix phenomenon a definitive physical home.
- Falling Down (1993). Joel Schumacher’s urban thriller gets a limited-edition 4K from Arrow.
- Prom Night (1980). Synapse debuts a world-premiere Dolby Vision restoration on 4K. Only 3000 units are available!
All told, July’s calendar tops sixty new 4K titles. A full month.
INDUSTRY WATCH
The vault question hanging over the whole hobby got bigger this week. Warner Bros. Discovery’s catalog, one of the deepest libraries in film, is heading into new ownership. Shareholders approved a $110 billion takeover by Paramount Skydance in April, and the deal now waits on regulators. In the meantime, boutique labels are moving fast to license Warner classics while they still can. Arrow, Criterion, Shout! Factory, and Vinegar Syndrome’s Iconoscope all hold Warner deals now. When a century of movies changes hands, the discs already pressed are the copies no merger can rewrite.
MARKET SIGNAL
Here is the number that reframes every “physical is dead” headline: vinyl records topped $1 billion in US sales last year, the first time since 1983. The lesson buried in Sony’s game-disc obituary is that the death of a format is a choice, not a law of nature. When a physical format is treated as something worth owning, people still buy it by the billion.
STORE OF THE WEEK
Videodrome (Atlanta, GA)
Since you are reading a newsletter about owning movies, meet the store that bet its life on it. Opened in Poncey-Highland in 1998 and named for the Cronenberg film, Videodrome is the last video store standing in Atlanta. Roughly 37,000 titles line a 2,000-square-foot space, about 30,000 DVDs and 6,500 Blu-rays, plus a curated wall of VHS for sale, all shelved the way a cinephile actually thinks: whole sections by director, rooms for Lynch and Cronenberg and Tarantino, shelves for film noir, Blaxploitation, and Serbian cinema. The staff’s knowledge is encyclopedic, and when rentals alone got hard, they built the Plazadrome screening series at Atlanta’s oldest theater rather than fold. It is the anti-algorithm, and it is a short drive from where this newsletter is written.
(Next week: Scarecrow Video, Seattle.)
THE STACK
What I pulled off the shelf this week.
Chappelle’s Show: The Lost Episodes (Uncensored)
Format: DVD, 1 Disc
Bonus Features: Unaired Sketches, Deleted Scenes & Bloopers, The Fabulous Making of the Chappelle’s Show
Before he walked away from a reported $50 million deal, Dave Chappelle left behind three nearly finished episodes, and this disc is where they live uncut and unbleeped. It is a fascinating time capsule of a comedian caught between his peak and his breaking point, exactly the kind of artifact streaming quietly lets slip out of reach.
SIGN-OFF
That is Issue #1. If you know one person who still alphabetizes their shelf, forward this to them. That is the whole growth engine we have, and it is a good one.
See you Friday.
