Creator / The Criterion Collection

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The Criterion Collection is a home video distributor of, in its own words, "important classic and contemporary films". Its first releases were LaserDiscs of Citizen Kane and King Kong (1933); it currently releases DVD, Blu-ray and Ultra HD Blu-ray editions of films. The films the above description covers range from cult classics to internationally acknowledged masterpieces, and from the silent movie era to the present day, with no genre or country of origin being overlooked.

Founded in 1984 by arthouse film distributor Janus Films, Criterion pioneered much of what is now taken for granted on DVD and Blu-ray releases: the use of letterboxing to preserve the correct Aspect Ratio of a film, audio commentaries (which they essentially created on the laserdisc of King Kong), director's cuts, and including supplemental materials. And when it comes to supplements, they have supplements — every trailer and TV spot that can be scrounged up, vintage and new documentaries, thick booklets of critical essays, sometimes even print copies of the source material if the film was an adaptation of a short story or novel. Criterion are also noted for the intense care they take to clean up the film prints and for the quality of their finished products. And their DVD and Blu-ray releases have become noted (particularly in The New '10s) for their unique cover art and sometimes packaging.^note Videodrome, for instance, is given a cardboard slipcase for the cover art. The actual DVD case looks like a Betamax tape, with the title scrawled on the spine.

Criterion licenses their titles from studios (with most titles technically sublicensed from Janus Films, which has the same ownership as Criterion), so the releases occasionally go out of print... taking their bonus features with them. Also note that Up Marketing applies to the collection, due in part to the relatively small audiences for many of these films; with rare exceptions, a single-disc title is $30 (U.S.)... and many, many Criterion releases are multi-disc sets.^note Currently, the largest release that bears a spine number is 100 Years of Olympic Films: 1912–2012, a set of fifty-three films that will set you back $399.95 at SRP; however, the most expensive set ever sold by the Collection is the out-of-print Essential Art House: 50 Years of Janus Films, which consists of fifty films and costs $850 at SRP. (And you thought the companies that made anime DVDs were bad....) Currently they also offer two sublines:

• Eclipse: Box sets that collect thematically-linked titles. Common themes include the more obscure work of particularly prolific major filmmakers (ex.: a set of early Ingmar Bergman titles) and the work of lesser-known but innovative ones. More specific sets include the four horror movies made by Japanese studio Shochiku in The '60s and a sampling of the output of England's Gainsborough Pictures, whose period piece Melodramas were among the country's most popular films in the 1940s. These collections allow a look into styles and eras of world cinema that often go neglected. A Vanilla Edition line, but these movies would likely never see the light of The Present Day otherwise. Originally considered all but discontinued, Criterion announced in 2024 the line would continue but on Blu-Ray, and would receive both new collections and remastering of old ones for 1080p presentation.
• Janus Contemporaries: In The New '20s, Janus re-commenced distribution of first-run films to specialty cinemas in the United States (in association with Sideshow). Vanilla Edition physical disc releases of these films are through this line as a stop-gap before full Criterion editions can be released.

Beginning in The New '10s, Criterion became notable as one of the few distributors that continues to release non-Vanilla Edition discs of pre-1980s and/or foreign-language films to DVD, as the Great Recession resulted in many studio-based distributors severely cutting back on so-called "catalog" titles aside from those that fall under Small Reference Pools.

The Criterion Collection has released hundreds upon hundreds of films on DVD. Each film has a spine number, denoting the order in which Criterion released it to the format (Seven Samurai, for example, has a spine number of "2", denoting that it was the second DVD Criterion released), but this is not always the case, as some titles have been postponed to a later date (The Grand Illusion, spine number "1", was released on DVD almost a year after Seven Samurai, owing to discovery of the original, long-lost camera negative). Updated versions and Blu-ray editions of these titles inherit the spine number from the previous version.

Barring a few British releases, Criterion DVDs are Region 1 encoded (North America only) and their Blu-rays Region A (The Americas and most of Asia). Eureka Video's Masters of Cinema👁 Image
series, Arrow Films👁 Image
's Arrow Academy (classic and arthouse films) and Arrow Video (genre films and B Movies, focusing mostly on horror) series, and Powerhouse Films👁 Image
's Indicator series could be regarded as the UK equivalents. Turner Classic Movies is more or less the television equivalent and has aired many, many Criterion titles over the years; in 2016, they entered into a joint venture with Criterion to create a new subscription online streaming service, FilmStruck. Unfortunately, FilmStruck was shut down on November 29, 2018. But Criterion promptly announced a streaming service of their own, The Criterion Channel👁 Image
, which launched on April 8, 2019 and features a constantly updating library of features and shorts — including many that are not in the physical catalog — plus bonus content. A selection of Criterion titles is also available for streaming on HBO Max, Netflix, Hulu, and Kanopy.

Also of note is their regularly scheduled visits to the Criterion Closet👁 Image
: a giant closet where the company keeps copies of all their releases. Every episode they have a Celebrity Special Guest (ranging from famous directors like Guillermo del Toro and popular actors like Willem Dafoe, to some truly crazy darkhorse picks like video game designer Hideo Kojima) come on, pick their favorite arthouse releases amidst the vast collection, and give their thoughts/personal stories about the film in question. And yes, they're allowed to keep as many releases as they can carry.

In 2024, to celebrate its 40 year anniversary, Criterion announced "CC40"L👁 Image
: a deluxe special edition boxset featuring forty curated films (alongside all their supplements) that were carefully selected to best represent the spirit of the company and its message of quality.

Directors represented in The Criterion Collection with their own pages:

Films released in The Criterion Collection include:

The Criterion Collection contain examples of:

• Meaningful Release Date:
  • The Blu-ray of A Night to Remember was released on March 2012, just one month shy of the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the RMS Titanic.
  • Godzilla: The Showa-Era Films was released on October 29th, 2019, just 5 days away from Godzilla’s 65th Anniversary.
  • Intended with the standalone Blu-ray release of Tokyo Olympiad: It was released on June 23, 2020, exactly one month ahead of what would have been the opening of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics had they not been postponed to 2021 by the coronavirus pandemic.
• Milestone Celebration: The Godzilla: The Showa-Era Films box set is Spine #1000. Previous Criterion DVD or Blu-ray box sets gave each movie its own number, whether or not it also received an individual release^note For instance, The Samurai Trilogy has numbers #14, #15, and #16 on the spine, but from here on the box sets only have one number each.
• Number of the Beast: The Devil's Backbone is Spine #666.
• What Could Have Been: The collection had planned to release some films on LaserDisc, but ended up as cancelled. Among these films include Blue Velvet, The Bridge on the River Kwai, A Few Good Men, and All Monsters Attack(!). The first and last films in that list finally made their way to the collection in 2019.