The Extras - Bill Hunt Discusses Paramount/Warner Bros Merger PLUS WB's 2026 4K Slate

Episode Date: March 12, 2026

Send a textWe sit down with Bill Hunt of The Digital Bits to unpack the Paramount–Warner twist and his thoughts on the merger's impact on physical media. We also discuss how replication bottlenecks and layoffs are reshaping the industry. Then we review Warner Bros' entire 2026 4K slate, their boutique licensing partners, and why there is an urgency to keep buying physical media.Purchase BEN HUR 4KPurchase EXCALIBER 4KFollow Bill Hunt on The Digital BitsLearn more about The Digital Bits PatreonMore purchase links: ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN 4KALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN 4K STEELBOOKSPEED RACER 4K Steelbook The Extras Facebook page The Extras TV YouTube ChannelThe Extras Twitter Warner Archive & Warner Bros Catalog Group Join our new public Facebook Group for Warner Archive Animation Fans and get the latest update on all the releases. As an Amazon Affiliate, The Extras may receive a commission for purchases through our purchase links. There is no additional cost to you, and every little bit helps us in the production of the podcast. Thanks in advance. Otaku Media produces podcasts, behind-the-scenes extras, and media that connect creatives with their fans and businesses with their consumers. Contact us today to see how we can work together to achieve your goals. [e-mail]

Hi, I'm Gregory Orr, grandson of Jack Gell Warner, and producer of the documentary Jack Gell Warner The Last Mogul, and you are listening to The Extras. So, Bill, how long have you been reporting on physical media? My goodness, 28 plus years, closing it on 30. Wow. Since the very beginning of DVD, basically. And I've been involved in the industry before that. I went to film school at the University of Wisconsin.

but I was for my first 10 years out of college, I was a video producer. Right. You know, doing actual corporate content and things like that. So it wasn't until 97 when DVD happened. And I started hearing about it before it came out from my industry friends that I started doing what I'm doing.

Yeah. So roughly 30 years, physical media. How long have you been doing social media? Not since the beginning. Oddly. I mean, obviously, a website. But yeah, I mean, we didn't, I don't think we really started the bits

social media presence until, gosh, we were a few years behind. I think, was it, social media was sort of like 2010, 2012. You were talking like iPhone, 2005? Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, something like that, yeah. I think, you know, Facebook, I think is probably where we had the first presence, but like Twitter X, but I don't do like, I don't do Instagram. So 30 years physical media, maybe 20 years social media.

Anybody on social media ever think they know more about physical media than you? Oh, you see that occasionally. Or do you see people who don't know, don't know who I am? Because if you've been following this stuff for a long time, most people know who I am, but there are lots of younger kids who are just kind of getting into it or, you know, for the first time and they will hear about it. The funny thing is, though, I just out of curiosity, I asked AI. I checked with like chat GPT, checked with GROC, checked with Gemini, like, you know, because you Google yourself, right, to see what people are saying.

And I googled myself and it seemed to get it pretty right. I did this, you know, the Ask AI. And so I thought, I asked in another question, which is like in the last 30 years, what's been the best source of accurate information about upcoming releases, about these formats, about the format wars, et cetera, et cetera. And they all listed, all of them, the bits was like the top thing. And it's like, okay, I'm proud of that. Yeah.

I'm proud of that. We worked hard for that. I guess what it shows is that the Gemini is actually correct. I want to believe it is for sure. I mean, you know, we've definitely worked very, very hard over the years to sort of get, to be the most sort of accurate source of that information. Yeah. Well, if you don't know by now, joining me today is Bill Hunt, editor of the digital bits. And we're going to talk about the big elephant in the room, the Paramount Warner Brothers news, of course. But we're also going to discuss physical media news. And that includes the Warner Brothers 4Ks coming out in 2020. We're obviously several months in now. So we'll also talk about some of the titles that already came out and her. Curious to get your feedback on that.

And then maybe some other titles and some other partners of Warner Brothers as well. So that we'll wrap all that in together and it'll be a lot of fun. But let's start there with the news that Paramount won the bid for Warner Brothers Discovery and Netflix bowed out. Where were you? What was your reaction when you first heard the news? Yeah. I was very surprised because it seemed like, you know, Netflix had it wrap. up, right? There was all the talk about the deal was signed and it was the agreement and that

sort of thing. I think the reality is that I was doing a Patreon video and and I started, my phone started blown up and I, you know, I was added on silent mode. And when I got on, when I stopped recording the Patreon video, I looked and I was, yeah, and it was kind of shocking. I suppose in some sense it's not because I think it's, it seemed to me fairly clear that that a lot of the sort of deck was tipped in Paramount's favor, and that the Netflix purchase would have been a bit of an uphill climb for a lot of reasons. But yeah, I was surprised. I mean, I personally thought that the Netflix purchase would be better.

And there are a lot of reasons for that. I mean, because I know the popular opinion immediately was, oh, no, Netflix is a streamer, and that's bad for the film industry, and they've made comments about, you know, the how the industry needs to change and theatrical windows aren't the future anymore. And I know that that was all true, but I think that blinded people to a couple things, one of which is that I think Netflix is a really, really smartly run company. They are very smart.

And when they commit to something, they're all in. And they tend to be very ahead of the game, right? They were ahead of the game on streaming. They were head of the game on the mail order DVD rentals. I think they're very, very savvy. And my problem with the Paramount Skydance purchase is that when Skydance purchased Paramount, the first thing they did, in the lead up to that purchase, first thing they did was parachute an executive team onto the Melrose lot,

and they just started firing people. And they fired a lot of people. I mean, a lot of people. And I can tell you that, you know, I used to know 20, 30 people over in home entertainment at Paramount, and they're almost all gone now, almost all of them. were gone. And what we've seen in the last year or so is that the Paramount's catalog for case slate has just evaporated. They're still releasing titles, but they're rebrands. They're repackages of existing titles they've done previously, you know, elite case titles that are now in

steel book packaging or whatever it might be. That was sort of the middle of last year. After that, they really only had two, which was Minority Report and Catch Me If You Can for Spielberg, I think, in December. But that work had already been done. And since then, there's been absolutely nothing, even though now they've signed a distribution deal with Alliance Entertainment. But there's – and I know that there's a couple of titles they're trying to get going, but it's just – you know, Paramount used to be one of the bright spots in terms of 4K catalog. They used to do, you know, a dozen or two a year. And that's just completely dried up. And so that's really very frustrating.

and my worry is, you know, what happens if, you know, the skydance, Paramount Skydance people parachute under the Burbank lot and do the same thing. And that is not outside the realm of possibility. Right. Yeah. Well, I mean, a lot of argument out there that Netflix really wouldn't have done anything better than Paramount in terms of... True. We'll never know. I mean, at this point, we'll never know. And I think that, you know, there's kind of two ways. of looking at, one is the big picture of the industry. And that's what a lot of Hollywood, I think, is working through right now is, you know, the fact that, hey, these studios are, there's getting to be less of them.

And I'm referencing, of course, the Disney, you know, purchase of Fox a while back. But that's a fear about the industry overall in Hollywood. And then you and I are a little more myopic in terms of we're looking specifically at these home entertainment groups and things of that nature as well. And that, you know, those don't always have the same response from me anyway because, you know, to your point of what they did there with the Paramount Home video, that's very scary because I talk primarily about Warner Brothers releases. Yeah. And I worked at Warner Brothers and still have friends over there. So, you know, that's a scary thought.

To interject briefly, you and I also know what happened at 20th Century Studios, at 20th century Fox. Right? When Disney purchased it, right? That whole catalog went behind the sort of Disney, Disney wall. And not only are we not getting a lot of Disney 4K catalog, we're not getting very much, you know, 20th century Fox or 20th century studios 4K catalog. It's just only in the last year that we've started to get a few, really.

But, you know, it's like, as physical media fans, that's huge for us. Yeah, yeah. And I know a few people who were at Fox went over to a Disney. they stayed on, but have recently been laid off. It spoke kind of quietly because it wasn't in the news or anything, but even they are shrinking that area. So it makes it hard to think that they're somehow going to increase. Though this deal that they have with Sony releasing, is that helping?

Have you seen a bump there? It is helping. Yeah, it is certainly helping. And for example, it's interesting to me because about two and a half, Two and a half to three years ago, I was asked by some folks at Disney for a list of 4K titles that I thought, catalog titles that I thought would be really big sellers on the format. And so I gave them a list of about 50 titles. And I said, here's an A list of like really good titles. There's a B list of kind of deeper cuts. But those all would sell well. And there was nothing for for a while. And then last year,

the top three titles on that A list of titles that I gave them, Tombstone, Kingdom of Heaven, master and commander, boom, boom, boom, they all came out, right? And there were several other titles that came out as well. And what was really interesting is they sold so well, they couldn't keep them in stock anywhere. And that has been the real problem, is that Disney did sort of try to get back into it a little bit more last year. And there's a bottleneck in terms of replication for particularly 100 gig discs, right? So that's why you've also seen a lot of titles be bumped down to 66 gig discs instead of 100 gig. But yeah, they couldn't make enough.

They just couldn't make enough. And obviously with the tariffs and all the other stuff that's happened in the last year or two, that whole situation has gotten so complicated that I think what happened is they got snake bit a little bit and they sort of throttled back a little. And so now they're a little more cautious than they were even a year ago. And so we'll see. I know there are a couple. There are a few things coming this year.

And they tell me that toward the end of the year, especially there's going to be some more. but that replication bottleneck is a real problem right now for 4K discs. Yeah, yeah, it's across the board, you know, for all the studios. It's impacted one archive, which I talked about probably the most of any on the extras here. You know, you try to set a release date and you can get your pre-order in, but nothing is showing up at your door on street date or very little is. And the fact that even the biggest of the titles, the 4K, that those aren't showing up on time tells you just how dire it is

in terms of that bottleneck. Well, and it used to be that the studios would announce these titles months in advance and they would send out a press release and they would let us all know, right? And now what happens is we know they're coming. We find out that they're coming. But they don't announce until right before street date,

right before the planned street date. And I think the reason is is because they are just scrambling to make as many as they can to meet demand for that first month. And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Right. Well, and part of the team for home video are the people who work on those press releases.

Yeah. And you might think, well, does that go through corporate communications? No, corporate communications is for the studio. You have a team that just works on the home entertainment releases. And there's just not many of them left. So that also is a part of it because it's not just one person who's, sits down and writes that release, you have other people reviewing it because let's, that's be fair to the person writing the release. They don't know everything about every title.

For sure. A little assistance. Hey, check this over. And so you do this and there's always something that's being reviewed and, you know, by you if you're working on it or somebody else. For me, I would only look at the part that really had to do with the extras, you know, that were going to be on that disc, make sure that was correct. Or, hey, you forgot that we actually have a one or two more items there or hey let's point this one out because it's you know it's an audio commentary with the director or an actor let's really point that out so now you're just going to you know you're going to get very little minimal communication unfortunately as part of all of this

layoff yeah yeah it's it's definitely the physical media industry is not what it once was even I mean they're it's what's great is there are headlines lately that you know younger people are Gen Z and stuff is kind of rediscovering physical media and Blu-ray and DVD and 4K are starting to kind of rise again a little bit after plateauing for a long time. But it's still, people don't realize the industry is not what it was even 10 years ago. It's like, it's a shadow of itself in terms of the people in the industry who are fighting to get these titles out. When we last talked like on the podcast, it was a few years back, and you said that was the future. That's where we were going to be going. Have you seen that?

basically kind of come true, come to fruition? Because on the one hand, you have this kind of, wow, there's so many titles coming out. And, you know, does it feel like there's a real abundance of stuff? Which is true, right? But there's, there's less replication options. So you get these bottlenecks. And I think what is kind of the mirage or the false is that you've got more titles coming out, but they're selling a lot less units. Yeah. They're selling less and, you know, there's also more mistakes, right? So you might buy a title. Out of every like five titles you get, there might be one that has a disc error or like some kind of replication problem. And then you have to go through either, hopefully you can exchange the disc or return it, but you might

have to go through a replacement program. And that takes, you know, as you know, it can take months to get a disc back. And again, as you said, the studios don't have as many people as before. So, you know, I think, for example, for Warner Brothers, there's like literally one person who handles all of their customer service needs.

So it's like, can you imagine? If there are three, four thousand people trying to get a replacement disc and there's literally one person handling it, right? Right. This is sort of the problem. And so, yeah, it's just, I mean, and then when it comes to 4K players,

there's only really two mainstream manufacturers now. There are a couple of sort of boutique manufacturers that are much more expensive, but yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's not what it was. And it's a shame because I really think that we're getting a greater number of really interesting titles than ever before. Right. You know, and finally, I think it did last year and this year, we're starting to see titles that people have been really waiting for a long time. But yeah, it's just, it feels like everything is sort of on a, on a, it's like a little bit of a house of cards, you know what I mean? You never know what, what, what announcements?

or what world event or, you know, whatever it might be that could just slow everything to a halt. Yeah. Hey, let's get back to that Paramount Warner Brothers because we strayed away from that for a second. But I don't know if you got a chance to see. I just did a short video that I put up on YouTube. And basically there, I didn't get into who should, who shouldn't, which way. I basically was like, look, as fans of physical media, as people who have loved and support, for decades, you know, from buying VHS as many people, even back to Laserdisc,

but VHS, DVDs, Blu-rays, 4Ks now, and whatever the future might bring, because these things are so much kind of at higher levels of corporate America and Wall Street that it's really hard for the individual collector to feel like they have anything that they can do. And I just basically reminded people, look, one thing we can do, we can keep buying. and that will still hit the bottom line and it will help the Warner Archives and the Warner Home Entertainment.

It by no means guarantees anything. Right, right. It does two things. It does help their bottom line. And number two, it's what we want to do anyway. And, you know, we want to fill our shelves like you have behind you and I have behind me. Yeah, right.

Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And, you know, I'll replace a DVD with the Blu-ray or Blu-ray with the 4K so that I, I don't fill up this whole room here, but, you know, we enjoy it. And it's something that those of us who are dedicated to it, that the studios rely on. They rely on us to keep that business going.

So it's hard to really feel like we could make a much difference in terms of whatever our opinion is on these. But, you know, I do hope that if this all goes forward, that the fact that Warner Brothers has, I think for a good, chunk of the history of of Blu-ray and DVD and 4K been one of the biggest distributors of my entertainment. I know when I was there, we were number one year after year after year, and other companies would use us, including Paramount, to release a lot of their catalog. And I have hope, some hope, that the people who are left can continue to do their work, and time will tell and we'll see.

But unlike the Disney where they bought Fox, they did not buy the lot. Right. You know, Fox kept the name. They kept the lot, but they sold the content library and the theatrical part of it. There is some hope that Warner Brothers, the brand, just how successful it's been, how large it is, that it can continue even with these mergers, these purchases, you know, from Discovery now Paramount looks like. and whatever the future has to hold. Yeah, you would like to think, you would like to think that Warner Brothers

will continue to be a studio with a heritage and all the institutional knowledge, right? And rather than just what happened to Fox, which it just basically becomes a brand within the sort of Disney Empire and to a lesser extent, Paramount with Skydance. So, yeah, we can certainly hope. I mean, I really do, you know,

I know that there's, one of the things you mentioned is that Paramount is going to probably keep both lots. which in theory is good, right? But of course, you know, that's only as good as do they keep all the employees or do they keep enough of the long-term employees at each studio to really have retained that institutional knowledge? Because that's obviously the key in terms of, you know, catalog and just understanding the history, understanding what's in the vault, right?

That kind of thing. Yeah. And I understand why, you know, people have responded to the video I put up And people have been, yeah, you know, they're a little more cynical. And I get that. I get the fact that people say, well, you know, when Wall Street is running things, it's hard not to get a little cynical because the creatives aren't making all the decisions. And so, you know, a lot of people get let go.

Even when I got let go after AT&T made the purchase of Warner Brothers and then they decided to bring on discovery, I mean, so many great creative people were let go from Warner Brothers that I'd worked with. So many great creative people at HBO. I'm talking about people who developed the shows, wrote the shows, and produced the shows. Yeah. And yet, HBO still is very strong, still doing quite well. It somehow survived all of that because I wasn't sure. And then Warner Brothers TV, I did so much work with Warner Brothers TV in the heyday of the 2005-200,

to 2020, the heyday of all the DC shows and on the CW and just so much content. You know, the Big Bang Theory, which I worked on and two and a half men and all of these great shows were created by people. Right. They are creative people who create these shows. But one thing I will remind people is that a lot of that content aired on CBS. There's been a longstanding good relationship between CBS, Wormon. Brothers Television in terms of selling a product. And guess who owns CBS? Well, Paramount. So, you know,

I see glimmers of hope. I may be naive and I may be proven wrong, but I do see glimmers of hope. And of course, you know, we don't know that it's actually going to finalize at the time we're talking, but just based on what we do, kind of know, and where we see it kind of going. And as I said, the characters in the library, the Bugs Bunchies, the Tom and Jerry's, you know, the Clark Gables and the Humphrey Bogart's, they'll endure it through this whole process. We're just kind of worried about the home entertainment group. Yeah, for sure. For sure.

And it's, you know, because as you said, you know, this stuff is people are cynical about sort of Wall Street and these sort of business interests. And the problem is it's very much Wall Street that told the studios, oh, you have to have a streaming operation. Like if you want to be a serious studio, you've got to have a streamer. And the problem is, is there's only so many television households in the U.S., right? And I think it's 119, 120, something like that, million TV households in the U.S. And every household has got a budget for two, maybe three streamer services, right? And a little

bit of overlap. But otherwise, you know, you're capped. You're totally capped. You can't, there's a ceiling and you can't exceed go past. Even if you try to go international, the problem is that everywhere you go around the world to start streaming, you have to build the infrastructure and you have to maintain the infrastructure, right? So there's just a ceiling. Streaming is only going to be so profitable,

and that profit is typically going to be determined by your audience and how much churn there is and how much you spend on content. Yeah. So in theory, these libraries should always be evergreen, right? They should always be evergreen. But here's the problem with streaming and with digital. If you have a favorite film

and you know, you're a diehard fan of, you know, gone with the wind or Ben Hur or whatever it is, you know, when a brand new version of that film comes out on a new format and a box or lots of cool extras and great new remastering and stuff, you might go out and spend 50 to 100 bucks on that, right? If it's really special, you might do that. Yeah.

But once you purchase it digitally, you will probably never buy it again. And so physical media allows the, it allows new generations to keep discovering and rediscovering this content, right? Because lots of people probably watching this today weren't here for the dawn of the DVD or even Blu-ray, but like their older brothers

or their parents were or their older siblings were and then they were younger at the time, but then they discovered their family's collection, right? And they got into it. And physical media keeps that stuff fresh. It keeps it in people's minds. And it feels special, right? Like a box set just feels like a special thing.

But if you're just talking about clicking on a stream or spending like $9.99 to buy the digital rights. At that point, it's not special anymore. You're not likely ever to buy it again. So by pivoting completely to streaming, what the studios realized is, oh my God, we're cutting off like one of the biggest sources of revenue for us, or a big source of revenue,

but also the source of revenue that keeps it special, that keeps it evergreen, right, for fans of this stuff. Yeah. So, yeah, it was, you know, and that's the word. world we live in now. We're never going to not go back to having streaming. But I hope, and I would like, and I'm sure you're on the same boat, I would love to see a world where these two things can coexist and that both of them are given equal weight and given equal seriousness, right? Because the physical media, you know, whenever you go to do a new physical media, really,

typically you go into the vault, you get out the assets, you do a remaster, a preservation. So that physical media from the very, very beginning, especially with DVD on, that's how, how the studios financed the preservation of their catalog. And that's very important. Even in an all-streaming world, you've got to preserve those assets. Every, you know, 10, 15 years, you have to go in and look and see where we are.

And do we need a new scan? Do we need a new safety negative or whatever it might be, right? So hopefully, you know, that world where these things can go exist will last for a while. I don't know that I would make any bets on anything, but I'm hoping it lasts as long as possible, right? Because I love this stuff. Right, right.

Doomsday scenario, you don't see physical media going away completely ever, do you? In theory, no, but it's possible. You know, I mean, let's, I mean, I was just going to throw out a hypothetical. Most of the chips that go into players and hardware are, because your player is the computer, right? This is all computers. Most of the chips that go into those devices are, you know, they're made in Taiwan. And most of this stuff is packaged in China.

And let's imagine that there's some kind of a conflict with, you know, China decides to invade Taiwan or, you know, whatever it might be. Whatever it could be. And I know, by the way, because disk replication, there's only so much disk media that's produced and there's a limited number of factories do that. There's only like three major replicator plants around the world that do most of the physical media, three or four. So there's all of these kind of single point failures. And you could imagine some kind of, you know, some kind of global event or something that happened that might disrupt that flow. And all it takes is is one or two things. Obviously, we had a pandemic not that long ago.

There's, you know, the recent tariffs. I mean, these things can happen, right? So you just don't know. Yeah, I hadn't really thought about it. But you could get cut off if nobody is making the players anymore. Yeah. I mean, we're down to two. I mean, back in the heyday, they were six, seven companies making Bluroy players.

Now it's, you know, we're down to like two or maybe, I think it's maybe three or four, but only two really mainstream ones that make affordable ones, right? Yeah, yeah. All right. Enough, enough negative there. We aren't there yet. No, we are. We actually have a lot of great stuff coming out.

Yes. So. Keep both alive. Well, part of me is like, hey, you know, about the future. Right now, I am loving. it. Like, I'm loving life as a physical media collector right now. This is not 2008, 2010, Lord of the Rings, you know, box sets and like amazing where we're breaking new ground. But still, I'm loving these 4Ks. So let's talk about these, the Warner Brothers 4Ks that we know about. Because you posted about this,

you kind of broke that story. I think before we get into the stuff that hasn't released, let's talk about these amazing ones that have released. And I'm talking, I'm talking to you. and her. I mean, stunning. Yeah. I mean, you've done a review and I didn't read it because I wanted to watch mine first.

Right. Oh, totally. I got mine and then I'm like, what, Bill's got a review up already? I know. And I was like, and I did see your one post like, this is amazing. Like you had even finished reviewing the whole disc. But tell us about it. The reviews out there, of course, people can go through it and read the whole thing on your.

website. Tell us a little bit about this one. So I think it's an 8K scan, but the negative is gorgeous. I mean, the negative is in great shape, right? It is one of the best classic film restorations in 4K that I've ever seen. It's right up there with like the searchers that Warner Archive did with Jaws, the universe will put out a couple of years ago. It is astonishing. It is astonishing how good this film looks.

And yet it still looks like film, right? The grain is still there. But they went in and they digitally, I believe, redid some of the transitions that are typically optically printed in the past, right? So you'd get a generation loss in quality when there was a fade or a dissolve or something. It's just, it's stunning. I popped it in the moment I got it. And I started marveling at it so much that I ended up having to watch the entire film like that moment. It dropped everything and watched it. And we're talking a very long film. It's got intermission. It takes a lot. And by the way, both the, it's split over two discs, right?

And the first disc, which has most of the movie, is 100, the longer half, right? Is 100 gig. So it's the bit rates are just through the roof. It's just, oh, it is just beautiful. And then, you know, Warner Brothers, it's like, they're pricing their discs so affordably. Yeah. I think it was, you could get it for like 25 bucks on Amazon in places. And it's just, man, worth every penny.

Well, I'm looking at your review just at the top where you put the A. You have film program grade A plus, video grade A plus, audio grade A plus, audio grade A. And the extra is coming at a A minus, but still it's A across the board. Yeah. And I mean, there's always usually something you can find fault in a release. But this one is just a home run. Yeah, oh, 100% home run.

And by the way, the extra is a minus. The only reason we gave it the minus because there were a couple. of things that had been included on the on previous dd limited editions it didn't carry over and so if you've got that that beautiful limited edition package you might still want to keep that for that sort of thing but yeah you can't i mean the avie quality is so good it's just you i mean yeah you you can't go wrong i mean even with a blind purchase in that title you can't go wrong it's just if you if you care about this stuff like we do it's just astonishing and that that came out well i guess in february and the same the same same street date, let me pull up this other one, we had all the president's men, which I just

watched a couple of days ago. Yeah. And I thought it too was terrific. I mean, terrific film, but I mean the 4K. What were your take on that? Yeah, also, yeah, also very good. I'm not, I think one of my guys, I think maybe Stephen reviewed that on the bits, but yeah, I mean, also very good. It's, you know, obviously they, you know, there's Warner Archive does their stuff. Warner, Warner, Warner Discovery Home, Radio does their stuff. And then obviously they, they licensed them to the things out. But Warner proper, they do such a great job of, you know, of remastering it. And they really have kind of up to their game in the last couple of years. And you can always count on those titles to be really top rate in terms of picture and sound

quality. It's pretty terrific. Yeah, I loved it. I mean, what's funny is I was trying to think, you know, when did I see that film? And my dad, who was not a movie guy, dragged the whole family to go see that one. I was so young, I had no idea what the story was about. But of course, those of us, you know, who are older, we understand what, what it happened there at Watergate. I think a young person now, if they were to watch this and the quality of the 4K, it's terrific. Now, the story telling is a little bit stylistically different, but I personally enjoy it. That was kind of the heyday of when we actually looked up to journalists. Do you remember that? Yeah, for sure. Now we are the journalists who actually, you know, the industry has been destroyed, but that

film really was an era and a time where journalists were doing terrific work. And there was sort of an expectation of certain kind of standards for journalism, but also for politics, right, certain kinds of behavior that were acceptable and were not. And yeah, it was very much a different time for sure. And obviously in the 70s, too, that was, you know, The America in particular was jaded, right? That was post-Vietnam. There was just, yeah, there was a lot of stuff in the air. And people sort of had different expectations.

And even just as moviegoers, you talked about how your dad, driving the whole family to go see. That late 70s, early 80s was a time when you just, if something came out, you just went to see it because you had no idea what to expect, but you were constantly, almost every weekend, there was some, you know, two or three movies that today we consider like iconic right that we're amazing and and you could just do that and the the 70s

films you know they have a certain look to them and i you know i enjoyed so yeah that's a new hollywood aesthetic yeah yeah uh and of course we lost robert redford you know not too far back so that's great seeing him in that film it's always uh gee you get you get to be our age you start losing these fine actors that you grew up looking up to and idolizing. And that's the sad part. The good part. They're forever on film. Looking terrific. Their performances are captured. To me, 4K, like the fact that we can, we can not only appreciate those performances that these actors gave, but we can now appreciate them better than we ever have before, right? Because it's like if you've only seen them on television or DVD or whatever, or even Blu-ray, you've never seen

seen what, you know, basically what's on the negative, right? And it's, unless you actually went to the theater, even in the very first, you know, the beginning of it, right? So, yeah, it's, I love that. I love, like watching Ben Hur, just seeing Charleston in his prime. It was just, I mean, wow, you know, it was a thing. He's manly. You know, my dad was military.

So I grew up in this kind of manly, you know, environment. And I watched Ben Hurd and I'm like, that was an era. That was like masculinity. But it's fun to see an era and how it represents certain things like masculinity or journalism or whatever might be. That's beauty of these films. That it captures that through the creative process of the filmmakers of that era. Well, let's move on to some more of what's coming in 26. I don't know if you have a list in front of you.

What are some of the ones that you want to run down? Maybe we should run through all the ones that you've heard of anyway. Well, I can tell you, so I've pretty well tracked down through multiple sources. The entire main slate, 4K slate for the year for Warner Brothers, obviously a couple of these titles could change. And lots of them haven't been announced yet. Barry Levinson's Sleepers was just announced. That's coming out on 421. And the title hasn't, now this one hasn't been announced yet, but I know it's coming.

And this is one that really makes me happy is the Wachowski's Speed Racer. I love this film. And when I walked out of that film in the theater in 2008, I thought, that's a masterpiece. That's a masterpiece in the same way that the Matrix was, right? In a different way, but in a similar way in terms of just pushing the film aesthetic of cinematography and editing, pushing it forward another quantum leap past what they did with the Matrix. And it blew me away.

But of course, this is a shamelessly optimistic candy-colored. movie that came out right at the same time as like Iron Man and the Dark Night when everyone was like the gritty dark realism was the thing everybody was in the mood for so nobody knew what to think about Speed Racer. But I love that film and it's been really lovely to see in the last five or six years how there's all these think pieces online now and YouTube videos where people are going wow you know what Speed Racer was really actually pretty amazing. And you know the aesthetic that they advanced in that film is something that we didn't really see again until

Mad Max Fury Road came out until the Spider-Man animated Spider-Man into the Spider-Verse did some very similar things, right? This film did that almost 10 years earlier. And I love it. And it also, the other thing about that film is

when it came out on Blu-ray, it was only on a BD-25, wasn't even a BD-50s, so it was very compressed. It only had Lossie Dolby Digital. It didn't have lossless audio. So to see this film I'm finally getting the sort of love and care it deserves. I'm so excited.

I've pushed for this film in 4K for years. I've championed it. Yeah. So excited for it. And you've been mentioning it on X, how excited you are that this one's coming out. May 19th. So I was working at the home video and I remember Paul loved it.

My boss there at that time, Paul Hemstreet. He really enjoyed it. He was working on it, I believe. And when it didn't do the. box office that people were hoping or expecting. I remember he was very disappointed, but, you know, sometimes certain things need a little bit of seasoning, I guess. Just ahead of their time.

I mean, the funny thing is the first time I saw a speed racer was Ronnie Sass, from Ronnie Sass at Warner Bros. Got me into a studio screening on the Warner lot in that, in the Ross Theater, right, which is an amazing theater, one of the best in town. And I was a huge fan of the original anime from the 1960s as a kid. It was the first thing I ever loved as a kid. Just to run home from school to see it on UHF TV, right? And I walked out of that theater just on Cloud 9, man,

because there's so many little touches in that film that if you are a fan of that original anime, it's clear how much love went into that, went into the Wichowski's put into SpeedRacer. So, yeah, to me, that's one of the sort of Holy Grail titles. I've been really excited for it. Okay, what else? So in, it looks like June,

This is starting to appear for pre-order, but it's not dated anywhere yet. But my sources tell me it's probably June 16th, somewhere about that time, is Chuck Russell's Eraser, the Schwarzenegger film. It's from 1996. So that's coming in June. After that, so the only other title that is has actually been revealed officially, which just happened, as you know, a couple weeks ago, Warner Brothers teased that they're finally doing Gone with the Wind in 4K later in the year.

And my guess is that will be the big holiday title, right? That'll be the big holiday title. So Gone with the Window's Coming. But in terms of other titles, there are a couple that were sort of talked about last year that got delayed, one of which was Martin Campbell's Green Lantern, 2011 film. My guess is that probably got delayed because of the new Lantern's TV series.

So sometime later this year, my understanding, is Green Lantern. That Green Lantern film is going to come out. And there are four more that I know are coming at some point or they've been talked about. Five more, actually, pardon me. One of them is gravity, Alfonso Coron's gravity. That's being talked about.

These should all be coming. There might be a little bit of changes here and there, but these are all pretty well confirmed. P.T. Anderson's Magnolia is coming. Tim Burton's Mars attacks is coming. Neil Jordan's interview with a vampire at some point. And the final one is Frank Oz's Little Shop of Horrors. And that's a title that had been talked about last year,

But Frank actually, the remaster had been done last year, and he actually went out to do some screenings, and he did a couple of Q&As, and he said, yeah, this is coming at some point. And my sources tell me it's finally coming. It's likely to come this year. So that's pretty much for Warner Brothers proper, not including like Warner Archive or any license and stuff. That's pretty much the slate that you're looking at. It's like 12 titles. And just for those who don't know, for the Warner Archive, George Feltenstein, in the podcast with me, he has said that there will be some 4K coming this year, no number, but just last year, there were, I think, three releases that fell within the calendar year. The Searchers was at the tail end of 24. So it could be two, it could be three, but we'll see how that plays out. But there will be something more in the classic catalog. area, not the ones that are from the 90s and more recent.

So there will be that as well. And obviously, that's a nice balance, right? Yeah. Because these titles I mentioned are all titles that people have, you know, they're all kind of in that range of things that people have wanted in 4K for a while. So it's cool to kind of start seeing some of that stuff. And then you've got, obviously, George and the Warner Archive people doing like the great, real deep catalog stuff.

Yeah. Or classics, right? Yeah. And so it's nice to see that kind of variety. And again, you know, one or two of these titles, they could move around. One of them, you know, one or two of them could slip into early next year kind of a thing because that happens. But those are kind of all on the docket. And of course, the biggie for classic movie fans is gone with the win from 1939.

And people have been waiting so long for this to come out on 4K. That is going to be exciting. That falls under classic film. but at such a high degree of popularity that the main Warner Brothers Home Entertainment will be releasing that. One note I want to say is that it's the same group of people at Warner Brothers restoring whether it be for Warner Brothers Home Entertainment 4K or Warner Archive 4K. So the quality is just superb, as you previously mentioned. Yeah, Warner has their own team at Warner Motion Picture Imaging right on the lot there.

It's just their first rate. Talk quality, yeah, as good as it gets, right. And then I, because of what is coming out next weekend, which I believe is the Oscars, I did want to ask you about a couple of these right over my shoulder for those watching. The 4Ks came out over last year that came out. And I want to get your opinion on them in terms of which one might win the Oscar, because it does appear to be a two horse race. Yes.

And she had with the chariot riding multiple. It's Warner Brothers riding multiple horses here. It would appear to the Oscar win for Best Picture because both one battle after another and sinners have been taking the awards from the Golden Globes and Baftas and other places. So they seem primed. Do you have a pick there? You know, I think both films are deserving. And it's really, to me, it's really hard to pick because they seem to be really neck and neck.

So, you know, it's clearly going to be, those two titles are going to, I think, dominate most of the, a lot of the bigger categories. Unless some crazy thing happens where the two of them split the vote and then a third film sort of squeaks in. I mean, but it seems to be those two films. You're absolutely right. And they're both really interesting movies. Yeah, they're both very well done original films. And not everybody is going to like both movies. I understand that.

but I think it's amazing that those who are both coming out. It came out this last year from Warner Brothers. It just shows the amount of great product that they're putting out. Oh, man. And well, but then you look at the year before, too. I mean, the Barbie movie and the Dune movies. Like, there's nothing I'm looking forward to more right now than Dune Part 3. I mean, those first two were historic names.

They really are. Warner Brothers really does get you. Great showmaking. Because I'm a part of the Producers Guild and one battle after another won the award just the other night, more best picture. And I think probably 80% of the time, the Bluesers Guild Award winner has gone on to win. I'm going to say that one might be the winner, but they're both fantastic. Now, the 4K, let's talk about those just briefly.

They are both fantastic as well, I thought. Yeah, yeah, really great transfers. and the HDR makes a difference on each one. And yeah, they're both. And our good friend Constantine Nassar did all the extras on the sinners, and those are fantastic. Constantine's been doing great work for a long time. So it's terrific to see that stuff.

In terms of non-4K releases, I'll just say from the Warner Archive, that George has said multiple times that there is just, I think, 80 or more films, being worked on for release this year. And I mean, it's fantastic just in terms of the quantity that we're looking at. And that doesn't even include the animation or TV. So, I mean, we'll see how this all plays out. But it's setting up for a fantastic year here. And then I did want to ask you about these announcements. I think Vinegar Syndrome announced a while back that

They secured a major licensing deal. I don't know if you know anything about that. Yeah, yeah, I can tell you that Warner Brothers has licensed about 200 to 250 titles to the various boutiques. So that would be like vinegar syndrome, Arrow Video, Criterion, and some to Shout Factory. There are a lot of great titles coming. There are a lot of great titles. We've already seen Arrow put out caliber. I have to ask you about that.

We'll just take a minute. I looked at your review, and I think it just came out. You gave that an amazing review. It's gorgeous. It's gorgeous. Yeah, and that's a film that is very much, obviously fantasy film. I mean, that is sort of the high watermark for fantasy films, right? For the 70s and 80s kind of time frame.

And it's got a beautiful cinematography, and it's, you know, with color and soft focus and filters and to give it that sort of otherworldly look. And it's also, you know, a little bit of a gritty texture to it, right? There's a certain kind of grain that is in the image and should be. It shouldn't look too super glossy. And they nailed it. Oh, my God. The Warner MPI transfer and the grading and the work that Arrow did, it's just like,

it's exactly what it should be and exactly what you want it to be. And everybody I know who's seen it just as like, wow. I see you gave it A's across the board. You and Tim gave it A's across the board. Yeah, yeah. I sidetracked us from the overall discussion. No, not at all. But when you see that and you know that there's more coming,

it's a great sign to see them coming from Arrow with such great extras and great insurance and everything. This licensing deal, these are licensing deals, I should say, because there are multiple deals are enough to keep some of these boutique labels busy for two, three years. And in terms of the kinds of titles that they include, odds are if there's a film that you love from the Warner Brothers sort of new line, kind of that, that, that library, I would say, odds are good that most of the film that you're looking for are probably on the docket at some point here in the next few years. Well, you just do the simple math of what George at the Warner Archive has said is coming out or is being worked on. And then what you just said, I mean, there's going to be a wealth of films that people can look for their faves to purchase. And I think the Vinegar Syndrome ones will be more focused on made for TV, horror thrillers, and cult classics, I think is what they're press release.

Yeah, yeah, there's stuff tends to be a little more esoteric, but it's like, wow. I mean, just the idea that even those films are getting like 4K attention, you know, and it's just, it's amazing. It's amazing. And again, all of these films, you know, unless you were in the theater on opening weekend when these films came out, you probably haven't seen the way they're really supposed to look and the way they really do look, right? Yeah. So in some ways, it is a great time just for the sheer volume of 4K catalog releases that are forthcoming. Let's talk about the criterion one. One of them that you just recently did a review on, I think Tim did here, on that 19, 3,000. 35, Aero Flynn Classic Captain Blood. Captain Blood, yeah.

Which a lot of people waited a long time for that one. Yeah, a long time. So there's a lot of good Criterion and Warner Brothers titles being released there. And of course- Criterion kind of takes their time with their releases. They do, you know, they will get the rights and they will, it'll take, it might take a while to see the disc. But, you know. Bill, they have, it's going to take a little longer because. you know, maybe Netflix wants them to release

K-pop Demon Hunters or Frankenstein. And they have to put that on the schedule. But I thought that was interesting. I thought that was interesting that, well, number one, Frankenstein deserves to be released on physical media. Good, good Lord. And, you know, that was a fantastic film.

That's one where you're like, I mean, I know Netflix did a, what, two, one or two-week window around the country. But I think here in L.A. It was like a three-week window. It was a little longer here in terms of giving people a chance to see it in theaters because of the del Toro and just the cast and everything that were behind that one. So, yeah, so there should be a lot of good stuff coming from Criterion. I think that covers a lot of the Warner Brothers that we know about anyway.

Yeah. I would just mention a couple of animation titles for fans of the extras here. obviously coming up in just a couple weeks. We do have the Looney Tunes Collectors Vault, Volume 2. It kind of fell off the radar a little bit because we talked about it so far back. Yeah, yeah. But, I mean, I am very excited about that. And then another one that I posted about back in November,

but I don't know if I mentioned it on the podcast. And that is the HBO Max original's Looney Tunes cartoons, and that complete series will come out on DVD. in May. I know DVD, but still, it will be an instance where cartoons that were put out on a streamer now end up on physical media. So that's always a good thing. Yeah, and the thing of it is, you never know, right? Because if they sell well on DVD, someone may go, oh, wow, this is, actually did better than we thought. Maybe we should do a Blu-Rite, right? I mean, that's just how this works, especially now. You mentioned it a little bit earlier, but what about Shout Studios? Do you know anything

that they were doing. I can't talk too really specifically about specific titles. They definitely have some things in the works. But obviously, they went through

kind of a rough period of transition. They have kind of gone through a period of transition. I think it was a January of 2023. Oak Tree Capital purchased Shout Factory

and rebranded them Shout Studios, right? And then just last year, July 2025, they purchased Filmrise and then they kind of merged Film Rise and Shout

into this new company radio entertainment. And unfortunately, as part of that, a lot of people from Shout sort of were downsized, were let go. And the Shout website that fans really, really love, that direct-to-consumer website they had where you could see what was coming.

And if you pre-ordered a disc from them, you got additional swag and things like that. That kind of went away, sadly, and I think that was a huge mistake. And now you can, basically, it's the Groove website, I think, which I think is studio distribution services. Yeah.

So now you can sort of see what's coming there, but it's just a shame because that shout factory website was great for the fans, for the consumers. But especially if you were dire, and shouted worked really, really hard over the years to cultivate a loyal, dedicated audience of collectors. So there was a lot of turmoil there. And for a while, what I was hearing was pretty dire from inside. Like it sort of felt like the film rise people were kind of taking over. A lot of the shout people were sort of being housed recently, however, I've sort of learned

that that situation is kind of stabilized. And while Shout doesn't have the kind of output this year, planned for this year that they had for say a couple of years ago,

there's still some, definitely some very, very good titles coming from Shout Studios to 4K and obviously Blu-ray and clearly G-Kids, they've got their partnership with G-Kids and there's

some good stuff there. So, yeah, it feels like things have stabilized a little bit And I hope throughout the year, we're going to see more good shout 4K and Blu-ray stuff start to kind of rise to the surface again once things, now that things have settled down. That's good news. I mean, overall.

Definitely. For the physical media fan, we want all of these boutique agencies to survive because they're the ones that, as you said, they curate with us in mind. And not just the more casual, I'll pick something up if it's a, of really, really well-known. Yeah, it's sort of like Criterion or whatever, or I mean, now even error. There are a lot of brands now that are basically people know.

Collectors know that if this comes out from a certain label, you know it's going to be quality. So some people will even just blind buy stuff, knowing that that's the case, right? And look, I mean, and obviously all of these companies are working with limited resources and nothing's perfect, right? There's always, you know, an odd little weird thing that happens here or there, you know, it might be an error on a disc kind of a thing.

but one thing is, and I know you know this is true too, and the people that are working on this stuff within the industry really do, you know, yes, there are studio executives who sort of are just doing the best I can and don't really know and maybe you come from another industry or whatever, but the sort of rank and file people

that are really working on these discs really, they care, they really do care. They're passionate and they're working with limited resources sometimes, but they really do care. Yeah, yeah. Well, I guess we'll probably expect more delays on street date because there's so much product coming. That bottleneck is still going to be an issue, but it is good.

If you can just have some patience, when you see something and it has a pre-order with a street date, you know, if you want to get it, get it, get that pre-order in there, but know that if it just, if it shifts by a week or two, it's just the way the industry is right now, we all need to kind of just go with it across all the studios and boutiques. Yeah. And I think if you can buy direct, if these boutiques or these labels have a direct to consumer site, buy direct, right? Because you can hopefully have a better odds of making sure you get a copy. You know, and then there's also, you know, retailers like Diabolic DVD and Orbit and some, you know, they do a really good job of trying to meet their customers' needs.

You know, then you've got the larger places like Amazon and Walmart that are kind of hit or miss. And I know people have trouble with Amazon sometimes pre-ordering and then pre-orders just don't show up for weeks and things like that. But the point is, is when you see a title that you love, I think it's really, you know, don't wait, man, don't wait. Because you just don't know if you're ever going to get a chance. These 4K releases, some might be the last physical media versions of some of these films we get, right? I think if it's something you love, man, don't wait. Because, again, the more people are buying these things and sending that signal to the industry that we want these discs. We want these great movies and animated series and TV series. We want them on. on physical media, the longer this is going to last for all of us. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Hey, Bill. It's great. Thanks for sharing your opinions about the whole Paramount Warner Brothers thing.

And then, of course, the specifics about these titles coming from Warner Brothers and some of the boutique studios who are releasing Warner Brothers product. Appreciate that. I know I learned a lot and I hope the listeners did as well. It's always a pleasure, Tim, man. It's good to talk with you, my friend. Well, Bill is a terrific guy and he knows so much about physical media. He is a great resource, so I'll have all of his links there in the podcast show notes

for those of you who want to know more about his website or his Patreon. If you aren't yet subscribed or following the show, appreciate it if you do that. That helps us and allows us to get you the content right away. Until next time, stay slightly obsessed about physical media. Hey, are you a fan of the Warner Archive animation releases? Do you want to get the latest updates and news right away? If you're on Facebook, we have just created a brand new Facebook group called the Warner Archive Animation Fans group. And we celebrate past releases, but really, we created this group because of all of the great releases that have come in this year and are anticipated in the coming years.

So there have been a lot of great releases from the Looney Tunes Collector's Vault series. There's the Tom and Jerry releases. There's all of the Hanna-Barbera releases. I mean, there's just a wealth of animation coming from the Warner Archive. So we celebrate all of it. It's a community with other people who enjoy these releases and want to talk about them and share the latest news, reviews, and updates from the Warner Archive. So if that sounds interesting to you, check out the link here in the podcast show notes.

And we hope to see you soon.