The Criterion Collection

Based on Wikipedia: The Criterion Collection

The Company That Taught Hollywood How to Treat Its Own History

Before the Criterion Collection came along, buying a movie for home viewing was a bit like buying a painting from a garage sale: you got what you got, and nobody promised it would look anything like the original.

Films were cropped to fit television screens. Colors faded. Sound warbled. And the idea that you might want to hear a scholar explain what you were watching? Laughable. Movies were disposable entertainment, not cultural artifacts worth preserving.

Then, in 1984, a small company released Citizen Kane on LaserDisc, and everything changed.

What Criterion Actually Does

The Criterion Collection is an American home-video distribution company, but that description is a bit like calling a Michelin-starred restaurant "a place that serves food." Technically accurate, profoundly insufficient.

What Criterion actually does is treat films the way museums treat paintings. They track down the best available source materials—sometimes the original camera negatives, sometimes prints preserved by institutions like the Library of Congress. They clean and restore these materials using whatever technology is available. They present the films in their original aspect ratios, preserving the director's intended framing. And then they surround each release with scholarly context: essays, documentaries, interviews, and those now-ubiquitous audio commentaries.

That last innovation deserves special attention.

The Invention of the Commentary Track

The audio commentary—that voice explaining what you're watching while you watch it—was Criterion's idea. Their second LaserDisc release, King Kong from 1933, featured film historian Ronald Haver speaking about the production, the cast, the special effects. He explained how Willis O'Brien animated the giant ape using stop-motion techniques, how Fay Wray's screams were recorded separately and synced later, how the original theatrical release was substantially longer than the versions audiences had seen for decades.

This seems obvious now. Every Blu-ray release of a major film includes multiple commentary tracks. But in 1984, it was revolutionary. No one had thought to use the unused audio channels on a LaserDisc for educational content. No one had imagined that viewers might want to understand films rather than simply consume them.

Haver went on to record commentaries for Casablanca, The Wizard of Oz, and Singin' in the Rain. These tracks became collector's items. When studios eventually reclaimed the rights to these films and issued their own releases, Haver's commentaries often disappeared, replaced by newer recordings that rarely matched his scholarly depth.

The Letterbox Wars

Here's a problem that younger readers might not fully appreciate: for the first several decades of home video, widescreen films were shown on square televisions by chopping off the sides.

Think about that. A director carefully composes a shot with important visual information at both edges of the frame. The home video transfer simply removes that information. Characters speak to empty space. Visual jokes disappear. The entire grammar of cinema—designed for rectangular screens—gets crammed into a square box.

The alternative was letterboxing: adding black bars to the top and bottom of the screen, preserving the original aspect ratio at the cost of a smaller image. Many viewers hated this. They felt cheated. Why should they pay for black bars? Weren't they losing picture?

Criterion didn't care what viewers thought they wanted. With their eighth LaserDisc release, Invasion of the Body Snatchers from 1956, they introduced letterboxing and never looked back. Every widescreen film in their collection would be presented in its original aspect ratio, black bars be damned.

This was a principled stance that cost them sales. But it also established Criterion as the gold standard for cinephiles who cared about seeing films properly. And eventually, as televisions became wider and high-definition formats emerged, letterboxing became the industry standard. Criterion had been right all along.

The Spine Number System

Every Criterion release carries a spine number—a sequential identifier printed at the bottom of the packaging. King Kong was number 6 on LaserDisc. When Criterion transitioned to DVD in 1998, they reset the numbering system. Seven Samurai became spine number 2. Grand Illusion was supposed to be number 1, but restoration work on a newly discovered camera negative delayed its release by a year.

This numbering system has become a kind of cultural shorthand among film enthusiasts. Saying you own "spine 51" (Kurosawa's Rashomon) signals something about your tastes and priorities. The numbers themselves carry weight.

As of 2021, Criterion's numbering reached into the four digits. Spine 1104 was Citizen Kane—returning to the collection for the first time since 1992, now in Ultra High Definition Blu-ray format. The same film that launched the company in 1984 continues to mark milestones in its evolution.

The Corporate Archaeology

Criterion's corporate history reads like a family tree with complicated inheritance patterns.

The company was founded in 1984 by Robert Stein, Aleen Stein, and Joe Medjuck, later joined by Roger Smith. A year later, the Steins partnered with William Becker and Jonathan Turell to create the Voyager Company, which published educational CD-ROMs—this was the early days of multimedia computing, when people genuinely believed that interactive encyclopedias on compact discs would revolutionize learning.

Criterion became a subsidiary of Voyager. Janus Films, the legendary arthouse distributor responsible for bringing Bergman, Fellini, and Kurosawa to American audiences, took a minority stake. The arrangement was complicated but functional.

In 1994, the German publishing conglomerate Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck bought 20 percent of Voyager for $6.7 million. Three years later, Voyager dissolved. The CD-ROM market was collapsing as the internet rendered physical educational media obsolete. Holtzbrinck sold the Voyager brand and its assets to a company called Learn Technologies Interactive.

But Criterion survived. Aleen Stein, Becker, and Turell retained ownership of the collection itself. The partnership with Janus Films deepened into something approaching a corporate marriage—so close that in May 2024, both companies were acquired together by Steven Rales, an American businessman better known for his industrial holdings than his cinephilia.

The Distribution Dance

Releasing films requires distribution partners. Criterion has cycled through several.

From 1986 onward, they worked closely with Home Vision Entertainment, a company founded by Charles Benton as the home-video division of Public Media Inc. Home Vision sold and marketed Criterion DVDs while also producing their own releases, including something called the Classic Collection—a joint venture with Janus Films for titles that Janus owned but that didn't fit Criterion's main catalog.

In 2005, Image Entertainment bought Home Vision, becoming Criterion's exclusive distributor. In 2013, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment took over. Different companies in different countries handle Criterion releases abroad: Spirit Entertainment in the United Kingdom since 2023, Unobstructed View in Canada since 2019.

None of this matters to consumers, except when it does. Distribution agreements affect pricing, availability, and regional coding. A Criterion Blu-ray purchased in North America might not play on a player purchased in Europe, depending on the specific release and the equipment involved.

The Streaming Odyssey

Physical media is a declining market. This presents an existential challenge for a company built on lovingly packaged discs.

Criterion's journey into streaming began in 2008 with a partnership with Mubi, a streaming service then called The Auteurs. In 2011, they switched to Hulu Plus as their exclusive streaming partner. In 2016, they moved again to FilmStruck, a service operated by Turner Classic Movies.

Then, in October 2018, FilmStruck announced it would shut down in November. Criterion's streaming catalog was suddenly homeless.

The company's blog post at the time was characteristically understated: they were "trying to find ways we can bring our library and original content back to the digital space as soon as possible." Less than a month later, they announced the solution: the Criterion Channel, a standalone streaming service wholly owned and operated by the Criterion Collection itself.

The Channel launched in April 2019, available in the United States and Canada. It offers rotating playlists, temporarily licensed films from various studios, streaming editions of Criterion Collection releases with their special features intact, and original content including academic overviews and curated introductions. Some titles appear on the Channel before they've been released on physical media at all.

Criterion also maintains a relationship with HBO Max, which frequently hosts Criterion-released titles. Some films appeared on Kanopy, the streaming service popular with public libraries. The streaming landscape remains fragmented, and Criterion navigates it pragmatically.

What They Choose to Release

Criterion's catalog tells a story about how American taste in film has evolved over four decades.

The early LaserDisc releases included plenty of mainstream Hollywood fare: Halloween, Ghostbusters, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Armageddon, The Rock. These were popular films, not necessarily canonical masterpieces. Criterion was building a business, and popular films sold.

Gradually, the catalog shifted toward world cinema, mainstream classics, and critically acclaimed obscurities. The company became known for resurrecting forgotten films and presenting familiar ones in revelatory new transfers. Their restoration of The Passion of Joan of Arc, Carl Theodor Dreyer's 1928 silent masterpiece, used a print discovered in a Norwegian mental institution in 1981—the most complete version of the film known to exist, long thought destroyed.

The collection isn't limited to live-action feature films. Criterion has released animated films including Akira, Fantastic Planet, Fantastic Mr. Fox, and WALL-E. They've released television series: Tanner '88, Robert Altman's satirical miniseries about a fictional presidential campaign; Fishing with John, John Lurie's absurdist fishing show; selected episodes of I Love Lucy and The Addams Family. They released the Beastie Boys Video Anthology, a collection of music videos.

WALL-E deserves special mention. It was Criterion's first Walt Disney Pictures title, and it didn't result from an ongoing corporate deal. Director Andrew Stanton simply wanted to be part of the club. He approached Criterion, and they licensed the film as a one-off. That's the kind of cultural cachet Criterion commands: filmmakers actively seek inclusion in the collection as a mark of artistic legitimacy.

The Criterion Closet

Criterion's offices contain a closet stocked with every title they've distributed. They regularly film prominent directors and actors—Martin Scorsese, Pamela Anderson, and many others—selecting films from this closet. These videos, posted to YouTube, serve as both marketing and curation: watching what filmmakers choose reveals something about their influences and tastes.

The videos have a specific charm. The closet is genuinely cluttered. The celebrities seem genuinely excited. There's no script, just someone surrounded by thousands of films, trying to narrow down their selections. It's aspirational consumerism for cinephiles: wouldn't you like to have this closet in your home?

The Format Transitions

Criterion has survived multiple format wars, each time adapting while maintaining their editorial standards.

LaserDisc was their first home, from 1984 through 1999. The format never achieved mass adoption—the discs were expensive, the players were expensive, and the discs themselves were enormous, the size of vinyl records. But LaserDisc offered superior picture and sound quality compared to VHS, and it allowed for extras like commentary tracks. Criterion built their reputation on this format.

Three early titles—The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes, and The Third Man—were also released on VHS and Betamax. These were Criterion's only releases on those formats. Other Janus and Criterion titles reached VHS through Home Vision Entertainment, but without the Criterion branding or extras.

DVD arrived in 1998. Criterion reset their numbering system and began building a new catalog. Early DVD releases presented widescreen films in letterbox format, just as the LaserDiscs had. Anamorphic enhancement—a technique that used the full resolution of the disc for widescreen content, improving picture quality on widescreen televisions—didn't arrive until mid-1999, with their release of Insomnia at spine number 47.

Blu-ray presented a different challenge. The format emerged from a war between competing standards: Blu-ray, backed by Sony, versus HD DVD, backed by Toshiba. Criterion waited until the war ended in 2008 before releasing their first Blu-ray title, Wong Kar-wai's Chungking Express. They didn't want to invest in a format that might become obsolete.

Despite Blu-ray's higher quality, Criterion continued supporting DVD. Most new releases came in both formats, sometimes packaged together. A brief experiment with dual-format packages—containing both DVD and Blu-ray discs in a single box—ran from November 2013 through September 2014, ending after negative customer feedback. People didn't want to pay for formats they wouldn't use.

Ultra High Definition Blu-ray arrived in November 2021. Criterion's first UHD releases included Citizen Kane (returning to the collection), Mulholland Drive, and Menace II Society. All UHD releases include both a 4K disc and a standard Blu-ray, with special features on the standard disc. Select releases include Dolby Vision HDR and Dolby Atmos sound.

The Licensing Labyrinth

Film rights are complicated. A studio might own a film's theatrical rights while another company owns home video rights. Rights can be divided by territory, by format, by time period. They expire, get renewed, get sold.

This means Criterion titles sometimes disappear.

The Harder They Come, the 1972 Jamaican crime film that introduced reggae to international audiences, is no longer commercially available as a new Criterion release. You can only find it used. RoboCop, Hard Boiled, The Killer, and Ran—all previously in the collection—became unavailable when their licenses expired.

Sometimes Criterion publishes improved versions of films they've released before, making earlier editions obsolete. Beauty and the Beast (the 1946 Jean Cocteau film, not the Disney musical), M, The Wages of Fear, and Seven Samurai have all been upgraded and re-released. Over 200 of the 384 LaserDisc titles have been re-released on newer formats.

Charade presents an interesting case. The 1963 Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn comedy had fallen into the public domain due to a technical failure: the original release lacked the legally required copyright notice. Anyone could distribute it. Criterion still licensed their restored edition from Universal Pictures, ensuring access to better source materials and providing a proper presentation even though they weren't legally required to.

The Regional Complications

For most of its history, Criterion released films only in North America. International cinephiles had to import discs and hope their players would handle the regional coding.

Regional coding is a copy protection system that divides the world into zones. A disc coded for Region A (North America) won't play on a player coded for Region B (Europe). The system exists to control pricing and release timing across different markets, and it has annoyed consumers since its invention.

Criterion's DVD releases were a mixture: some Region 0 (playable anywhere), some Region 1 (North America only). Their Blu-rays were typically Region A locked.

In 2016, Criterion finally expanded internationally, partnering with Sony Pictures Home Entertainment to release titles in the United Kingdom. Six titles launched the initiative in April of that year. British releases are Region B locked, meaning North American players won't play them.

Distribution in the UK has since shifted to Spirit Entertainment. In Canada, Unobstructed View has handled distribution since 2019. The patchwork of regional partners continues to evolve.

The Cultural Position

British film magazine Sight and Sound, perhaps the most prestigious publication in film criticism, has called Criterion "the leading boutique Blu-ray label." This is probably an understatement.

Criterion has shaped how we think about film history. Their choices about what to restore and release have influenced which films remain visible and which fade into obscurity. A Criterion release confers legitimacy: if the collection includes a film, that film matters.

This power comes with responsibility. Criterion's catalog skews toward certain kinds of films: art cinema, prestige Hollywood productions, recognized masters. Other kinds of films—genre fare, exploitation cinema, work from underrepresented filmmakers—appear less frequently. The collection reflects and reinforces certain ideas about what counts as important cinema.

But Criterion has also introduced audiences to films they might never have encountered otherwise. How many Americans have seen Harakiri, or The Human Condition, or Sansho the Bailiff? These films weren't playing at local multiplexes. Criterion made them accessible, with English subtitles and contextual materials that helped viewers understand what they were watching.

The company serves multiple audiences: scholars who need accurate texts for analysis, cinephiles who want beautiful presentations of beloved films, libraries building collections for their communities, and general viewers curious about films they've heard are important but have never had the opportunity to see.

The Ongoing Mission

Forty years after their first LaserDisc, Criterion continues releasing films. The catalog grows by roughly fifty titles per year. Each release requires research, restoration, licensing negotiations, and the creation of supplementary materials. Each release represents a judgment about what matters in film history.

The formats will continue evolving. Physical media will continue declining, though probably never disappearing entirely—vinyl records were supposed to be dead, too. Streaming will become more important. New technologies will emerge.

Through all of this, Criterion's core proposition remains constant: films are worth treating with care. They deserve to be seen as their makers intended. They benefit from context and explanation. They constitute a cultural heritage worth preserving.

This proposition was radical in 1984. Now it's accepted wisdom, at least among people who care about such things. That shift is largely Criterion's doing. They taught an industry—and an audience—how to value what it had been taking for granted.