Where Did All the Special Features Go?

The Sad Decline of Movie Bonus Material

I recently rewatched The Lord of the Rings Trilogy on the brand new(ish) 4K release, Middle Earth: The Ultimate Collector’s Edition. This thing is 31 discs encompassing both The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings Trilogies, both extended and theatrical cuts and a special features disc. As I do with every LotR rewatch, after each movie, I follow it up by popping in the bonus discs and watching the hours of special features.

Except, to my frustration and utter bafflement, this “Ultimate Collector’s Edition” doesn’t include the special features. The “special features” disc contains a cast reunion special and a Cannes Film Festival presentation reel.

Are you f***ing kidding me?

Luckily I still had my old Extended Edition DVD boxset which does include all the bonus material: commentaries, making of documentaries, featurettes etc. So I was still able to get my behind-the-scenes fix, just in standard definition.

But the lack of special features in this so-called “Ultimate Collector’s Edition” was pretty shocking. Unfortunately, this is not unique to this release. The previous 4K release of The Lord of the Rings Trilogy also didn’t include the original material.

What gives? This is The Lord of the Rings we’re talking about, one of the most beloved film trilogies in cinema history. The Appendices included in the original DVD box set were so well made and so in-depth they almost have an entire fan culture in and of themselves. Viggo Mortensen breaking his toe while kicking an Uruk helmet in The Two Towers is so well-known to fans that it’s become a meme. Yet for some reason, Warner Bros decided these extensive extras documenting the years of hard work that went into these movies weren’t worth including in the latest release.

Lord of the Rings fans aren’t alone in their frustrations. The Fifth Element 4K release also included no special features and fans of Challengers recently took to social media to decry the lack of extras in that film’s Blu-ray release.

It didn’t always used to be this way.

Bang For Your Buck

As you can see in this quintessentially 2000s commercial, one of the main selling points of DVDs when they first came out was all the bonus content. Upgrading from VHS to DVD was pretty pricey back in the day. The discs were more expensive than the old cassettes, and DVD players fetched a steep price too. This is exactly why DVD ads made such a big deal out of the bonus material.

Not only was the picture and sound quality superior, but you also got all this extra content. In other words, special features added value to the product and justified the higher price. These days, with so many movies readily available on streaming, releasing a DVD or Blu-Ray without special features is absurd, because what are people paying extra for then?

Speaking of streaming…

Streaming Didn’t Have to Ruin Everything

We all know the story of streaming platforms “killing” physical media (we’ll come back to this) and I might not mind so much - streaming is more cost-effective and more convenient - but again, what’s with the lack of special features? Physical discs are limited by storage space, but streaming doesn’t have that restriction. Not only would it be straightforward to upload and list bonus material next to any Netflix title, but it also makes economic sense.

Streaming platforms thrive on shows, not movies. When Netflix spent upwards of $200 Million on The Grey Man, it’s not as if the platform gained $200 Million worth of subscribers in return. I know Netflix reps like to say things like, “If you count a view as a cinema ticket we made [an absurdly high number] at the box office.” The trouble is, Netflix didn’t sell any tickets and didn’t make any money at the box office. Most people who saw The Grey Man were already subscribed.

And that’s fine for a show; a streamer needs people to stay subscribed month to month so they need something to watch over a long time. Shows do that, but movies? They can be watched in a single sitting. But if streaming titles came with additional bonus content for a viewer to watch, that’s more retention time for the platform and a higher chance of a subscriber staying subscribed. Win-win!

And yet streaming platforms don’t include special features. The only platform which has taken a stab at doing this is Disney+, but that leads us to another problem.

The Problem with Modern Special Features

Not long after rewatching The Lord of the Rings I also rewatched Avatar: The Way of Water on 4K and thankfully this release had hours of extras. But a few minutes into watching the making of featurettes, something felt off about them.

The making of documentary for the first Avatar film feels like it’s telling a story. The soundtrack to the documentary is mostly music from the film’s score, the pacing of the doc changes to match the subject matter appropriately and the interviews are richly detailed. The featurettes for Avatar: The Way of Water, however, are different.

For one thing instead of a feature-length documentary like the original Avatar Blu-Ray, Way of Water’s 4K release comes with a collection of shorter featurettes. The intensity of the editing and music is always cranked up quite high. Interview segments are incredibly short, with the various cast and crew barely getting a sentence out before the featurettes cut away to B-roll. The music is also largely original material and not taken from the score. In a sense, these featurettes feel like trailers rather than actual documentaries. Even the featurettes on the Blu-Ray end with an Avatar: The Way of Water title card. I remember seeing that and thinking, “Yeah, I know, I bought the Blu-Ray already.”

In short, these special features are simply marketing material.

I still enjoyed the extras for Avatar: The Way of Water as they were quite in-depth, but these featurettes were designed to sell the movie rather than sell the making of the movie.

Disney+ also has a regular series called, Assembled, which explores the behind-the-scenes of various Marvel projects, but unfortunately, these are very barebones. Most of the episodes are made up of interviews with a main cast or crew member intercut with B-roll. There’s no in-depth exploration of the work which went into these movies, just bland interviews backed up by generic trailer music. In general, it feels like an afterthought.

Now to be clear using behind-the-scenes material for marketing is nothing new. The Star Wars Prequel Trilogy maintained a series of vlogs for episodes 2 and 3, released on the official website for fans to enjoy. Edgar Wright’s Hot Fuzz also did this and so did The Hobbit Trilogy. These behind-the-scenes peaks definitely helped generate hype among fans, but there’s a difference between bonus content working as marketing material and bonus content conceived as marketing material.

Rather than existing as an honest insight into the making of these movies, modern special features actively deceive audiences to generate hype.

This is a far cry from the likes of this Star Wars documentary which is soberingly very fly-on-the-wall. There are almost no talking heads and virtually no music. They even left things in like Ewan MacGregor dropping an F-bomb out of excitement, Jake Lloyd getting frustrated after multiple takes and George Lucas clearly being unhappy with the first cut of the film. It’s hard to imagine any of that finding its way into the squeaky-clean marketing material seen on Disney+.

Why This Matters

“Okay,” you may be thinking, “but isn’t this stuff only for film nerds? Why does it matter?”

Let me answer that question with another question: Did you know that in 2022, Ryan Reynolds and Will Ferrell starred together in a Christmas musical with songs written by the same duo behind The Great Showman’s soundtrack? If you’re an Apple TV+ subscriber this may sound familiar to you, but to everyone else, does this movie even exist?

And that’s the problem. In the streaming era, movies are - it was called Spirited by the way - movies are far more disposable than they once were. They aren’t treated as art, just content. Some streamers like Netflix don’t even care if you pay attention to what you’re watching and others like Max will happily delete its own originals to save cash.

Physical media and good special features go hand in hand in reinforcing the value of art. Holding a Blu-Ray in your hands makes a movie real. It exists. It represents all the hard work which went into making that movie. And good special features document all that work: how the idea was conceived; finding the right cast and crew; how the production team figured out how to pull off the hardest scenes; how other scenes were saved in the edit; what the cast and crew feel about their work looking back etc.

I’d be willing to bet that a big reason The Lord of the Rings movies continue to endure is not just because of their quality (they are very good of course), but because the near decade of hard work which went into them by hundreds upon hundreds of people was exhaustively documented and made available for anyone to see. Even The Hobbit movies gained some defenders when people heard about all the behind-the-scenes struggles documented in their own appendices.

One of the reasons I went for the “Middle Earth: The Ultimate Collector’s Edition” box set was because I thought it included all of that. I don’t even like The Hobbit movies that much, but the extensive special features made it worthwhile (or at least they would have).

But now we’re living in an age where $200 Million blockbuster movies pop up and disappear on streaming platforms and we have no idea why or how they were made and the streamers themselves don’t care if we watch them.

Hope For the Future?

It’s not all doom and gloom though. The rumours of streaming “killing” physical media have been greatly exaggerated. While it’s true the market has declined sharply, it has by no means disappeared. Boutique labels like Arrow Films, Kino Lorber and Criterion have found a healthy amount of customers thanks to their high-quality releases (original artwork, complimentary swag and of course heaps of special features), but there’s still demand from wider audiences too.

As detailed in this BBC article, Oppenheimer was one of the fastest-selling home video releases in recent years and while physical media sales overall have declined, the 4K market is growing. Indeed many publications have speculated that Blu-Ray may go the way of Vinyl; an archaic physical format, but one loved by a dedicated customer base of collectors and enthusiasts. While the jury is still out on that one, I think it’s a likely scenario. While certain retailers have stopped stocking DVDs and Blu-rays, no major Hollywood studio has indicated a desire to stop producing the format.

But if anything, it’s the backlash over the barebones release of Challengers which gives me hope. Why? Because 76% of those who saw the movie were Gen Z. If the rise of internet influencers has taught us anything it’s that young people want “the tea” (did I use that right?). People of all ages like hearing about how their favourite movie was made. Sure certain technical details are only interesting to film nerds like me, but the story of how a film is made is appealing to everyone.

And that’s what great special features do best: they tell a great story. A world without those stories is a much sadder place.

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