Between the late 90s and mid-2000s, home releases were often imaginatively packaged and stuffed with extras. We take a look back at the DVD boom…
Nostalgia being the reality-warping entity that it is, there are certain things from years ago that aren’t quite as good as you remember. Some of those old computer games you once liked probably wouldn’t hold up as well today as they once did. A lot of vintage sitcoms are best left in the past. And have you actually tried Angel Delight recently?
The DVD boom of the late 90s and early 2000s, on the other hand, really was a remarkable time for movies. So much so that, if you’re a reader of a certain age, you probably didn’t appreciate how good that era was until it ended. The arrival of movies on Digital Versatile Discs around the year 1996 meant that films suddenly looked better than they once did on analogue VHS tapes, and the media itself was lighter and cheaper to produce and distribute.
Not everything was great in the early years of the DVD, though. The image quality of certain transfers was far from perfect (something that wasn’t obvious if you had a small CRT television); some early releases required you to flip the disc over to watch the rest of the movie; the cardboard ‘snapper’ cases Warner Bros seemed to favour (at least in the UK) had a tendency to fall apart if you so much as breathed on them.
Read more: The things early adopters of the DVD format had to put up with
What the DVD also brought in, though, was a whole new way of packaging and presenting movies. In the VHS era, making-of documentaries tended to be sold on separate tapes, or as part of a box set. Even then, the docs tended to be brief and originally made for television; the home release of RoboCop in 1988, for example, was accompanied by The Video Collection’s The Making Of RoboCop, a fun little featurette that lasted for a scant 22 minutes.
Contrast this with the 1998 DVD release of John Carpenter’s horror masterpiece, The Thing, which contained a making-of documentary that lasted almost 90 minutes. Filled with lengthy contributions from the likes of Carpenter, effects genius Rob Bottin, cinematographer Dean Cundey, the cast, and more besides, it’s one of the most complete (and nerdiest) making-of features of that era.
The Thing’s DVD release also included deleted scenes (something else you didn’t see often in the VHS era), trailers, storyboards, and more extras of that ilk. Then there were audio commentary tracks – something originally invented in the LaserDisc format, but only became more widely adopted in the DVD era. The Thing included a good-natured chat between Carpenter and star Kurt Russell where you could almost hear the clinking of glass beer bottles in the background.
Countless other movies included similar audio tracks, of course, and it would be impossible to mention a small percentage of the best ones here. John Boorman’s wonderfully dry commentary for his 1974 cult item Zardoz immediately springs to mind – especially the moment where he rather vaguely mentioned how he convinced star Sean Connery to wear a wedding dress in one scene: “Let’s just say I could be very persuasive,” he said.
(The rise of audio commentary tracks was so widely understood in the 2000s that British comedian Rob Brydon used the concept as the basis for a short-lived TV series, Directors Commentary, in which he played the fictional director Peter de Lane.)
The early DVD age also ushered in a surprising ripple of creativity, both on the discs and the boxes they came in. Designers came up with nifty animated menus; certain releases of The Evil Dead were housed in a rubbery, faux-flesh Book of the Dead box. Goodness knows how much the latter cost to produce; whoever conceived it, sculpted it and produced it, we offer our lasting gratitude.
Those boxes often came with booklets (a special mention to the slim volume packaged with the initial release of Fight Club which contained quotes from its most excoriating reviews), postcards and other ephemera. An Anchor Bay release of Michael Mann’s 1986 thriller Manhunter contained a booklet styled to look like an FBI case folder, right down to the red ‘CONFIDENTIAL’ stamp on the front.
Alternate and extended cuts also became common in the late 90s and early 2000s. There was the rather strange Wake Up, Ron Burgundy: The Lost Movie, released shortly after the feature film came out in 2004. Essentially, director Adam McKay had shot so much material while making Anchorman: The Legend Of Ron Burgundy, and abandoned so many story ideas (including a whole subplot about a fictional terrorist organisation) that it was cut into a separate 90-minute release. (It wasn’t great, but an interesting curio nonetheless.)
Admittedly, some ‘Unrated’ or ‘Extended’ releases – such as American Pie and Enemy Of The State – were little more than marketing gimmicks, sometimes put out without a director’s consent. As we explored in a 2022 piece, director Simon West once wrote on social media that the ‘Unrated Extended Edition’ of his action thriller Con Air contained parts “he didn’t feel necessary to be in,” and that he preferred the original theatrical cut.
Read more: The strange emergence of the non-director approved DVD extended cut
Some of the alternate or extended cuts released around this time were of terrific value to film fans, however. The Alien Quadrilogy box set, containing no fewer than nine discs, has since acquired almost legendary status among fans of that franchise. It contained both theatrical and extended cuts of all four Alien movies released up to that point, as well as a borderline intimidating host of extras. The Quadrilogy discs also contained something else that bubbled up in the peak DVD era: hidden Easter eggs. One disc contains a hidden interview, for example.
(One of the most fascinating Easter eggs of the early 2000s appeared on the DVD release for Christopher Nolan’s Memento; with a bit of digging, you could unlock a secret, sequential cut of the film.)
Sadly, the DVD boom couldn’t last forever. The market for discs reached its peak in 2005, at which point the market was worth about $16bn in the United States. In 2007, Netflix emerged, and while it took a while for the change to happen, sales of DVDs (and later Blu-rays) gradually fell as the number of people subscribing to streaming services soared. As a result, film companies began to cut back on the amount of extras and thought they put in their DVD releases.
Of course, DVDs and Blu-rays haven’t vanished altogether – far from it – but the abundance of extras and sheer creativity is less common now than it was some 20 years ago. Where major studios were once bankrolling the production of impressive-looking making-of documentaries and boxsets with booklets and postcards, those sorts of releases are now more often the preserve of smaller companies like Second Sight or Arrow.
The Alien movies provide a worthwhile marker for how studios approach the release of major films. The 2012 Alien prequel Prometheus was packaged with The Furious Gods, a hugely absorbing, feature-length making-of documentary directed by Charles Lauzirika. Lauzirika’s involvement in the Alien franchise had been longstanding by that point; he’d previously overseen the Alien 3: Assembly Cut and made the similarly excellent making-of documentaries which first appeared on the aforementioned Alien Quadrilogy set.
Tellingly, perhaps, Lauzirika didn’t get to make a documentary for the next film in the franchise, 2017’s Alien: Covenant. The disc contains deleted sequences and a behind-the-scenes documentary, but nothing quite as frank and insightful as The Furious Gods.
Similarly, Alien: Romulus, which has just arrived on disc this week (December 2024 if you’re reading this in the future) contains several bonus features and a handful of alternate and deleted scenes, but nothing as extensive as the material packaged with Prometheus.
Read more: Alien: Romulus and its divisive line of dialogue
Meanwhile, YouTube channel Alien Theory has pointed out another, particularly interesting fact about the Alien: Romulus DVD and Blu-ray. It’s the first film in the entire history of the Alien franchise – including the Alien V Predator spin-offs – that hasn’t had a director’s commentary track recorded for it. There may be a logical reason why director Fede Alvarez – or someone else involved in the production – couldn’t provide one. All the same, it certainly feels like a marked contrast from the relative banquet of bonus material we’ve seen from earlier Alien discs.
The rise of streaming has undoubtedly had its positives: greater convenience, and for those with minimal living space, less clutter on their shelves. All the same, it’s difficult not to look back at the DVD boom era with a hint of wistfulness at all the imagination and creativity it brought about.
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