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Three minutes of Dracula sat missing for sixty-six years. Censors cut them in 1958, deeming them too gruesome, too sexual, and the footage vanished, seen only once, by audiences in Japan, before it disappeared into a warehouse. This month, Hammer Films found it. Not on a hard drive, and not in some cloud archive. In a physical film vault owned by Warner Bros., sitting in a box, waiting. The restoration streets in October, uncensored for the first time anywhere outside Japan, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing exactly as Terence Fisher shot them. Sixty-six years is a long time to wait to be found. But it was still there to find.
Read more: PM Weekly Issue #2: ‘Dracula,’ ‘Obsession,’ ‘The Crying Game,’ ‘Normal’Compare that to what Sony did on June 26th. The company confirmed it’s deleting 551 movies and TV shows, ones people paid for, from PlayStation libraries on September 1st. Terminator 2. Apocalypse Now. Hot Fuzz. Gone, the day the StudioCanal licensing deal expires. No refunds. No warehouse to search. No sixty-six years from now where someone finds it again, because there’s nothing physical left to find. When Sony deletes it, it’s actually gone.
That’s the difference this whole journal keeps circling back to. A physical copy can be forgotten, censored, buried, mislabeled, and shoved in a warehouse for six decades, and it will still be there when someone finally goes looking. A digital license doesn’t get forgotten. It gets revoked. There’s nothing to discover later because there was never anything to hold onto in the first place.
I keep thinking about the people who bought those StudioCanal movies thinking they owned them. In sixty-six years, nobody is going to find their purchases in a warehouse and restore them for a new generation. There won’t be anything left to restore.
Welcome to PM Weekly. Let’s get into the week.
THIS WEEK ON DISC
Fourteen titles landed on shelves this Tuesday, one of the busiest single street dates this journal has tracked yet.
- Michael (2026), Lionsgate, in Amazon, Walmart, and Lionsgate Limited exclusive SteelBook editions
- Obsession (2026), Focus Features/Universal
- Lee Cronin’s The Mummy (2026), Limited Edition SteelBook and standard release
- Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), Scorsese, Criterion 4K
- Hud (1963), Criterion 4K
- The Crying Game (1992), Neil Jordan, Criterion 4K
- Red Sun (1971), Charles Bronson/Toshiro Mifune spaghetti Western, Arrow Limited Edition 4K
- The Untouchables (1987), reprinted 4K SteelBook
- Ip Man: Kung Fu Legend (2026), Well Go USA
- Full Contact (1992), Ringo Lam/Chow Yun-fat, Shout! Factory Hong Kong Cinema Classics
- Howard the Duck (1986), 40th Anniversary 4K SteelBook
- Crawl (2019), new 4K SteelBook
- Normal (2026), Magnolia
- Legion of the Dead (2009), two-disc Blu-ray with restored director’s cut, Unearthed Films
INDUSTRY WATCH
The UK’s home entertainment trade bodies quietly delivered some good news this year. BASE and ERA’s year-end figures for 2025 show the 4K Blu-ray market grew 19.5 percent, driven largely by boutique labels and the rising popularity of Steelbook editions, which now account for nearly a fifth of all 4K spending despite representing just one in ten releases. Overall physical video, DVD and Blu-ray combined, still declined, but only by 4.7 percent, the smallest drop since 2010. The format isn’t reversing course. It’s slowing its descent while the collector-driven end of the market actively grows. Not every week has to be about what’s disappearing.
MARKET SIGNAL
A collectibles market in Genesee Township, Michigan drew crowds this past week specifically chasing VHS tapes, turntables, and vinyl, no algorithm, no shipping wait, just folding tables and people digging. The organizer pointed to renewed demand for VCRs and tape decks alongside the discs and records. It’s a small, unglamorous data point, but it’s the kind that matters more than a press release: people are still showing up in person for physical media, in a Michigan parking lot, on a random Sunday, because owning something beats renting access to it.
STORE OF THE WEEK
Scarecrow Video (Seattle, WA)
Nonprofit, staff-run, and home to roughly 156,000 titles, Scarecrow is the kind of archive a streaming algorithm could never replicate. The collection spans everything from studio blockbusters to region-free rarities, and the store rents out the hardware, LaserDisc players, VCRs, region-free decks, needed to actually watch half of it. It’s less a video store than a working film library, kept alive by people who show up because they want to, not because a metric told them to.
(Next week: VisArt, Charlotte.)
THE STACK
What I pulled off the shelf this week.
The Doors (1991) Format: DVD, 2 Discs (Artisan Special Edition) Bonus Features: Disc Two dedicated entirely to extras, behind-the-scenes footage, an archival trailer, and supplementary material chronicling the film’s production
Oliver Stone’s fever dream of a biopic gave Val Kilmer the role that still defines him for a generation of viewers, an uncanny, unsettling embodiment of Jim Morrison that the band’s own surviving members reportedly found hard to watch. Artisan gave it the two-disc treatment when that still meant something: a full second platter built around nothing but going deeper into how the thing got made. It’s the kind of physical-only excess that a single streaming file was never going to carry along with it.
SIGN-OFF
That’s Issue #2. Fourteen titles in one week, three million reasons to worry about what Sony can take back, and one warehouse in Warner Bros.’ back lot that proves the opposite can still happen too. 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
