The streaming landscape is fractured. While some movies and shows are easy to find, that’s the exception. To get a reasonable selection, it’s often necessary to subscribe to multiple services simultaneously. Sometimes, even that isn’t enough — if you really know your cinema, you’re aware that some titles can be difficult or impossible to find on streaming. You might find them on disc, but notably, there are releases that haven’t made the leap to Blu-ray, despite the format being 20 years old.
So what gives? The explanation, in many circumstances, has to do with the complicated legal and business affairs of the movie industry. At other times, though, there may be no easy way to bring your favorite media up to modern standards.
The legal and business barriers in your way (and theirs)
Business as usual
Most often, obstacles have something to do with ownership and distribution rights. A movie doesn’t just belong to the production studio that shot it. There are always other stakeholders, including domestic and international distributors. They all have varying degrees of influence, and if one of them legally objects to an action or doesn’t have the rights to pursue something, it can gum up the whole works. That could extend to something as simple as the soundtrack. If there’s licensed music that a record label can no longer (or refuses to) offer, that might block the film it’s attached to, at least until terms are re-negotiated.
Things get especially complicated when a company goes out of business. Consider the 1987 vampire movie Near Dark. Although it has a cult following, it was originally distributed by the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group (DEG), which went bankrupt just a year later. Its film library was sold to a company called Paravision International, and from there mostly ended up in the hands of StudioCanal. That seems to make rights questions fraught. Though Near Dark does occasionally appear on streaming, those deals are fleeting, and available Blu-ray copies are typically older editions with inflated pricetags. A 40th-anniversary 4K remaster is coming in 2027, yet it’s a little ridiculous that anyone had to wait this long.
It’s also worth remembering that every stakeholder is chasing one thing: profit. There’s no point in clearing legal hurdles if it’s impossible to find a service willing to pay for the streaming rights — commonly sold as part of a package deal — or there wouldn’t be enough of an audience to warrant printing discs. Martial arts fanatics might be dying for a 4K Blu-ray of Master of the Flying Guillotine, but chances are that the audience beyond that group isn’t much bigger.
The source material problem
You can’t polish coal
In some circumstances, the answer is a little more tragic: there’s no way to bring a title up to modern quality standards. The Golden Girls is available on streaming, but only in the same SD (480p) resolution as its DVD box sets. There’s no native 1080p version, let alone a 4K Blu-ray, for the simple reason that the show was shot straight to videotape. There’s no way to extract more detail. All that’s possible is to upscale what exists, perhaps artificially enhancing colors, levels, and other elements.
Titles shot on film can be scanned directly to 1080p or 4K, but that’s contingent on finding quality prints. By that I don’t mean perfect quality — just digitally correctable. Many movies aren’t in good shape, or have been completely lost to time, like 1927’s London After Midnight. There are a number of blockbusters from the silent era that have disintegrated or burned up because they were shot on nitrate stock.
Even more recent titles can be problematic. In the transition to the all-digital era, some movies and shows relied on 2K intermediates, which were digital conversions that made editing the final product easier. Chances are, you’ve been watching these intermediates in one form or another, rescaled as required. Yet if a studio needs to go back and fix something — like outdated special effects — it can be tough to track down component elements, and costly to revamp them.
Some remastering projects may be judged too expensive to be worth it. The process can quickly cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the most ambitious projects reach into the millions. That’s no problem if you’re dealing with a pop-culture phenomenon, but hard to rationalize for titles that might be beloved by a thin slice of the subscription or Blu-ray audience.
