This article appeared in the January 10, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

Cutter’s Way (Ivan Passer, 1981)

In 2024, Best Buy, the ubiquitous big-box consumer technology retailer, began phasing out DVDs and Blu-rays from its stores. The franchise, a strip-mall staple, cited the rise of streaming as the reason for this decision and claimed that “the way we watch movies and TV shows is much different today.” Best Buy’s move to curtail its sales of physical media puts a fine point on a larger shift in the way films are viewed and collected by consumers: simply put, owning physical copies of major films isn’t important to the casual viewer when they’re just one click away on VOD platforms.

But for dedicated cinephiles, hard copies—especially of rare and esoteric films—are still precious collectors’ items, and there exists a robust boutique Blu-ray market, far out of the mainstream, that caters to this audience. While The Criterion Collection is the most recognizable brand among these more niche labels, the company is far from the only game in town.

In fact, labels like Fun City Editions and Arbelos Films are making an explicit mission of filling in Criterion’s blindspots with rediscovered—and/or soon-to-be—classics. “[Our releases are] arthouse films, broadly speaking,” says David Marriott, who co-owns Arbelos with Ei Toshinari. The label boasts films like Béla Tarr’s Sátántangó and a collection of experimental narrative work by Nina Menkes (Cinematic Sorceress—The Films of Nina Menkes). “More specifically, we’re interested in films that we love and strongly feel should be part of the established ‘film canon’ but, for whatever reasons of commerce or circumstance, aren’t widely available—or aren’t available in quality versions,” he added.

The “perfect release” for Marriott entails finding “an underseen masterpiece” and producing or acquiring a quality restoration of it before putting out the film as if it were a brand-new release—with a theatrical rollout, specialty streaming deals, and, ultimately, a deluxe Blu-ray. “The ideal outcome is seeing a film level up from low-to-no audience awareness to a cinephile favorite,” says Marriott. “We’ve seen this arc over the years with releases like Toshio Matsumoto’s Funeral Parade of Roses (1969).”

Film historian Elizabeth Purchell made her name in the queer film world with Ask Any Buddy, a multimedia project that began as an Instagram account celebrating the aesthetics of vintage gay hardcore films and expanded to include a 2019 found-footage film and a podcast. After working with other Blu-ray companies over the years, she is now striking out on her own with the label Muscle Distribution.

Purchell also holds up Funeral Parade of Roses as an exemplar. The film was “released in the U.S. in 1970, and it played queer festivals on-and-off into the ’90s, but it was always a very obscure film” in America, she says. “It wasn’t until it was restored and received a full-scale theatrical release in 2017 [via Cinelicious] and then released on Blu-ray via Arbelos, that it became one of the canonical trans films. I’ve witnessed over the past 10 to 15 years just how crucial these rare releases are for rehabilitating films and filmmakers and performers who just never got their due for whatever reason.”

As with Purchell’s project, boutique Blu-ray labels are often driven and sustained by the tastes and enthusiasms of passionate curators. While genre films, particularly horror and porn, are big market drivers (as evinced by the popularity of releases from Vinegar Syndrome and Severin Films), labels like Fun City Editions are eschewing these reliable staples and leaning into their own idiosyncratic visions.

Fun City Editions takes inspiration from the ironic nickname given to New York City in the 1960s and ’70s. The name conjures a cinematic imaginary of urban grit that the label’s releases—cult classics that have faded into obscurity—exemplify: Richard Benjamin’s Sean Penn–fronted Racing with the Moon (1984); Ivan Passer’s cult dramas Cutter’s Way (1981), starring Jeff Bridges, and Born to Win (1971); Arthur Barron’s gritty teen-romance Jeremy (1973). The latter is a favorite of Fun City Editions’ founder and owner Jonathan Hertzberg, who grew up in New Jersey, just outside of New York City, in the ’80s and ’90s and oversaw restorations and reissues of classic catalog titles at Kino Lorber from 2013 to 2021. He launched Fun City in 2019. “It was never a film that was really in the canon . . . it felt very personal to me to put that one out because I just always felt like it needed a little more love,” he explains.

Justin LaLiberty has held various roles at Vinegar Syndrome over the last five and a half years. In 2024, he launched his own label, Cinématographe, which “seeks to fill gaps in the canon of American cinema . . . Cinématographe is as much a means of getting out movies like [Robert Altman’s 1974 feature] Thieves Like Us in really elaborate packages—because they’re canonical and they kind of deserve that treatment and have never gotten it—as it is of getting out lesser-known films and filling in gaps,” he says. This allows him to also release less categorizable films like Joseph Ruben’s Joyride (1977). “Even if something at face value isn’t immediately viable, the hope is that it becomes viable and that people get invested enough in the line and trust the curation.”

A successful Blu-ray release neither begins nor ends with an attractive physical object (though a beautiful design and exciting extras certainly help). Getting a film in theaters and on a streaming platform and getting critics to review it before its hardcopy release are crucial sales boosters. “It’s pretty much a guaranteed fact of the distribution business that when you put a film in theaters, you publicize it, the theaters publicize it, reviews are publicizing it—all of that builds awareness of the title,” says Frank Jaffe, who founded the label Altered Innocence in 2015. “Especially for the newer films, a title does much better on home video if you do a theatrical release versus if you don’t: it’s five to one, ten to one.”

Altered Innocence releases new and repertory films that typically explore queer themes, striking a balance between serving dedicated customers and bringing in new ones. The company’s recent release of Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker (2022) brought in new audiences to the label. “Hopefully they go on the website and find some cool films. Maybe they discover the films of Bertrand Mandico, which I would love,” Jaffe says.

But as much as he loves the theatrical experience, some films are better suited for private consumption, says Jaffe. An important part of his as well as Purchell’s work is making transgressive films—particularly queer and hardcore films that may not easily secure a theatrical or streaming release—available to audiences in good quality and with proper historical context. Examples include Patrice Chéreau’s The Wounded Man (1983), released by Altered Innocence, and J.C. Cricket’s Sex Demon (1975), a gay porno take on The Exorcist that Purchell rescued from obscurity after reading about it in vintage adult film magazine and helped restore and distribute via Vinegar Syndrome.

“There are some titles where, if I like them, I’ll say, ‘You know what? We’re not going to get this up on any VOD services except for maybe Vimeo, but let’s just do it,’” says Jaffe. “If it’s a good movie, then word of mouth spreads, and people will know that the only way they can watch this is on a DVD or Blu-ray.”

Chris Shields is a filmmaker and writer who lives in Los Angeles.

Sarah Fensom is a writer living in Los Angeles.