Between about 1998 and 2012, there was a certain type of Saturday afternoon that has no clean substitute now. The previous evening, you had seen the movie. You replaced the disk, went to the special features menu, and chose “Director’s Commentary.” For the next two hours, you sat with your laptop closed and listened to an explanation of what you had been watching from a filmmaker, an editor, the entire cast, or occasionally just a producer and cinematographer who kept talking over each other. Citizen Kane by Roger Ebert. Fight Club with David Fincher. Ridley Scott on any Blade Runner film he has ever worked on. These weren’t marginal additions. They served as the real education for a certain type of film enthusiast.
In 2004, the US market for physical DVDs reached a peak of almost $24 billion. People chose to purchase those disks rather than rent them in large part because of their unique features, which included commentary, deleted scenes, making-of films, storyboard comparisons, and isolated score tracks. You were buying not just the movie but also a second viewing experience that allowed you to participate in every scene’s decision-making. The expanded editions of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings had almost 26 hours of additional content. It didn’t matter if anyone saw it all. The item was worth possessing in part because of its potential.
The shift to streaming did more than simply do away with a distribution type. The business justification for creating that second experience was eliminated. Netflix, Amazon, Disney+, and the rest lack a physical product to set themselves apart, shelf space to justify, and a business strategy that rewards customers for delving further into a single item. Watch time, completion rates, and new subscriber acquisition are important streaming metrics that prioritize breadth over depth. In comparison to a subscriber who spends four hours rewatching a single movie with its commentary track playing, a subscriber who watches twenty various shows in a month seems to have superior results. Director’s commentary is a vertical experience by design, yet streaming’s architecture is designed for horizontal movement across material.
It is more difficult to describe what is truly lost than what is merely not available. DVD commentary was the main teaching tool used by film schools in the 2000s. Hearing a director explain, in real time, why they selected a particular angle or cut at a particular moment was irreplaceable. This was not in the context of a retrospective interview, where memories have been shaped by critical reception, but rather in sync with the frame itself, watching the same thing you’re watching, explaining the choice as it happens. No amount of film writing can fully capture the way decisions are made. Thru commentary tracks, editors—who are among the most invisible contributors to any film—became truly readable in a way that is just not possible in the majority of published film criticism.
For the movies it releases, The Criterion Collection carries on this tradition with commentary tracks, academic studies, fresh interviews, and visual essays that accompany the film. Boutique brands such as Kino Lorber and Arrow Video follow suit. The market for 4K Blu-ray enthusiasts is tiny but really dedicated, and there is enough demand to sustain specialty labels’ investments in supplemental content at a level that would have appeared low by mid-2000s standards, but at least persists. Some filmmakers have experimented with workarounds. Edgar Wright, for example, created commentary podcasts, a format that maintains the intimacy of the genre without the synchronization to the screen. Although the audience must be prepared to put in the effort to stay up, it’s a fair adaption.
Beneath all of this, there has been a deeper cultural shift in which the divide between producers and audiences has both decreased and deepened in conflicting ways. A filmmaker can instantly reply to followers on social media. However, promotional interviews and festival Q&A have largely taken the place of the lengthy, concentrated, in-depth discussion of creative choices that required ninety minutes of unbroken attention from both parties.such as when the same questions are posed and the same authorized responses are provided. The economics of streaming just don’t allow for the perception that commentary tracks resided in a certain area between marketing and teaching, answerable to neither. It’s still unknown if that area will ever be replicated in a different way or if it was simply one of the things that vanished without anyone really choosing to lose it.
