Creator / The Criterion Collection

The Criterion Collection is a series of home video releases of, in its own words, "important classic and contemporary films". Its first releases were LaserDiscs of Citizen Kane and King Kong; it currently releases DVD and Blu-ray editions of films. The films the above description covers range from cult classics to internationally acknowledged masterpieces, and from the silent era to the Present Day; no genre or country of origin is left unturned.

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 — 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.

Criterion licenses titles from their studios, 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. (And you thought the companies that made anime DVDs were bad...) Currently they also offer two sublines:

• Essential Art House: A budget line consisting of particularly famous Collection films without bonus features for $20 each.
• Eclipse: Box sets that collect thematically-linked titles. Common themes inclue the more obscure work of particularly prolific major filmmakers (i.e., 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. Another Vanilla Edition line, but these movies would likely never see the light of The Present Day otherwise.

In The New '10s, Criterion is 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, ostensibly to denote the order in which Criterion released it to the format. Updated versions of a Criterion release inherit the spine number from the previous version. For instance, Seven Samurai has a spine number of "2", denoting that it was the second DVD Criterion released (the first, for those keeping score at home, was The Grand Illusion). When Criterion issued a three-disc set for Seven Samurai in 2006, it supplanted that earlier (and now out of print) DVD from the late '90s. Blu-ray releases of these titles inherit the spine number from their original DVD release.

Many Criterion films were/are also available (minus the extras, of course) for online streaming via Hulu or as 1080p downloads via iTunes.

Criterion DVDs and Blu-rays are Region 1 encoded (North America only). Eureka Video's Masters of Cinema series could be regarded as the UK equivalent. Discotek Media might be considered the Japanese animation equivalent due to their releasing some high-profile series in the U.S. that were never released before, as well as the care they put into cleaning up their releases and including supplements with them. Rykodisc was also something of a musical equivalent, reissuing critically-acclaimed albums (they held the CD rights to the back catalogs of David Bowie, Frank Zappa and Elvis Costello in the '90s) with bonus tracks and detailed liner notes. Turner Classic Movies is something of a television equivalent and has aired many, many Criterion titles over the years (and, in 2016, announced a joint venture with Criterion to create a subscription online streaming service called FilmStruck).

The Criterion Collection includes Armageddon. (No, really. We're not kidding.) It was the Collection's final LaserDisc release.

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Films released in The Criterion Collection include:

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