Introduction
In 2020, Warner Bros. released Middle Earth: The Ultimate Collector's Edition — a 31-disc behemoth encompassing both the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies, theatrical and extended cuts. If you're a collector like me, you see something like this and immediately decide you want it. The thing would look incredible on a shelf. And if you're a Lord of the Rings fan, you know that the extended edition DVD releases from the early 2000s are some of the most celebrated home video packages ever made. Hours of behind-the-scenes documentaries. Cast and crew commentaries. Featurettes on everything from the linguistics of Elvish to how they built the props. It was the gold standard. Unfortunately, the Ultimate Collector's Edition didn't include any of it.The special features disc contained a cast reunion special and a Cannes Film Festival reel. That's it. If you wanted the actual bonus content, the stuff that made those previous releases legendary, you had to dig out your old standard definition DVDs from twenty years ago. What gives?
The Special Features Were the Point
When DVD arrived, in addition to bringing better picture quality, it brought a Trojan horse full of bonus content that nobody had really asked for but everyone immediately wanted. Commentary tracks (first done by Criterion), making-of documentaries, and deleted scenes with optional director introductions, isolated score tracks, etc. Sometimes they even had easter eggs buried in the menus that rewarded the curious. The sky was the limit.For a kid like me who was endlessly curious about how films were made, this completely blew my mind. I could now watch movies with the director, hearing him explain every decision, scene by scene, in real time. I could also watch the storyboards alongside the finished film and I could see the deleted scenes that didn't make the cut and understand why.
The special features were my film school before film school. By the time I actually sat in a classroom and heard words like mise-en-scène and motivated lighting, I already had an intuitive feel for what they meant because I'd spent years listening to directors and cinematographers talk about their craft on commentary tracks.
The Golden Age
Some releases from that era set a bar that has never really been cleared since. A few that come to mind -- The Back to the Future trilogy set — commentary tracks across all three films, a feature-length making-of documentary, Q&A sessions, production design featurettes. You could spend a full day inside that release and not run out of content.
- Spider-Man (2002) came loaded with behind-the-scenes material that captured a specific moment in superhero film making history that feels almost archaeological now. They even had an E! Entertainment special that I don't believe I've seen on any other release.
- The 1978 Superman: The Movie had a presentation befitting its status as the film that proved superheroes could be taken seriously. I remember spending a whole day just watching how the movie was made. I was never once bored. This one is particularly memorable because it was an older movie so I learned quite a bit about rear-projection and the Zoptic process.
- Terminator 2. Beyond the content itself, the menus on that release were genuinely interactive in a way that felt like the future. It was sort of like interfacing with a computer (or Skynet). The Blu-ray of Terminator 2 was also impressive. You had to unlock the extended cut of the film using your remote to input 82997 (Judgement Day). The art of the DVD menu is also something that unfortunately has mostly gone away.
- The 1966 Batman TV movie had a hidden menu item if I recall correctly, but I can't exactly recall what it was. I know for a fact many other movies had hidden features as well. I might have to come back and edit this out if I can’t find it.
What Changed?
Studios looked at streaming and rethought their whole strategy. Why invest in bonus content for a physical release when the margins were shrinking and the audience was migrating to platforms that didn't support any of it? A commentary track doesn't play on Netflix. A making-of featurette doesn't show up in a digital rental. The business case for special features evaporated the moment the business model shifted, and so the features themselves started disappearing until bare bones became the default and a commentary track became a selling point worth advertising on the back of the case. Some of those features got ported over to YouTube as marketing material, but it just wasn’t the same (especially with all the ads). Recently, I bought the new Superman 2025 4k and to my surprise, the director's commentary was missing. It's a digital-only exclusive for some reason.The cruelest part is that the studios didn't even have the decency to admit it. They kept using words like "special edition" and "collector's edition" while subty gutting the content those words used to guarantee. The Lord of the Rings Ultimate Collector's Edition is the most egregious example, but it's far from the only one. Pick up almost any major studio 4K release from the last five years and compare the bonus content to its DVD equivalent from twenty years ago. The older disc wins almost every time. For this reason, it's not always necessarily a smart move to upgrade from DVD to Blu-Ray or 4K. Sometimes, the DVD has more content. Or at the very least, you should keep your DVDs for the purpose of archiving those special features.
The Ones Who Kept the Flame
While the major studios were abandoning special features like ballast off a sinking ship, boutique labels were doing the opposite. Criterion had always understood that a film release was also a cultural document. Their discs usually always include scholarly essays, new interviews, archival materials, and commentary tracks that treat the film as seriously as any academic publication. I've noticed some releases are more bare bones than others, but they do try to include whatever they can.Arrow Video built their entire identity around the idea that a great release is everything around the transfer. They also include essays, interviews tracked down decades after the fact, and even alternate cuts sourced from formats most people forgot existed (Arrow's newest TMNT release comes to mind for this). They approach each release like a research project, and the bonus content reflects that. Vinegar Syndrome does the same for exploitation and genre cinema, films that nobody else would bother with, given the kind of exhaustive treatment usually reserved for acknowledged classics. It's pretty admirable how they pull obscure movies from out of the darkness. The release that solidified my desire to keep supporting boutique was Shout! Factory’s (RIP) 4k release of Darkman. This release included 40 minutes of never before seen footage that was cut out of the movie (and was only known because it was included the novelization). It wasn’t even good footage (deleted for good reason), but it’s still pretty exciting to see.
These labels kept the faith when the studios walked away from it and collectors noticed. For that reason, people who care most deeply about physical media have largely migrated toward boutique releases not just for the transfers, but for the extras because that's where the love actually lives now.
What We Lost, What We Have
I think about this every time I put on an old DVD commentary track. There's something almost melancholy about it, listening to a director or cinematographer talk excitedly about a film they made, knowing that the format that made that conversation possible has been largely abandoned by the industry that created it.The commentary track, at its best, is one of the best experiences home video ever produced. You're hanging out with the person who made the film (or contributed a great deal to it) for two hours, as they walk you through every decision. No interviewer, no edit, no PR filter. In my opinion, it’s pretty priceless. Streaming doesn't have it. Some digital rentals have it, but for the most part don't. The only place it reliably lives anymore is on a physical disc.
Which means, as always, the collectors are the ones keeping it alive. Every boutique label release with a packed extras disc is a small act of defiance against an industry that decided its own history wasn't worth preserving. Every old DVD pulled off a shelf to access commentary content that never made it to the 4K upgrade is proof that the people who loved this stuff weren't wrong to love it. The studios forgot what made the format special but the boutique labels and fans didn't. This is why it’s important to support these boutique labels because if they don’t do this preservation, no one else will. Do yourself a favor today. Make some tea or coffee and go listen to the director's commentary of one of your favorite movies. I promise you won't regret it.
-TG