From a 1984 laserdisc start-up to the most-influential film curator in the English-speaking world. How a small Manhattan operation shaped what serious viewers actually watch.
The Criterion Collection has, since its 1984 founding, become the most-influential curator of serious cinema in the English-speaking world. The collection now includes over 1,200 titles. Almost every working serious-cinema fan has, at some point, used the Criterion catalogue as their working canon. The company's annual half-price flash sales are minor cultural events. Its physical Blu-ray packaging is itself collectible.
This essay traces the company from its origins to its current state.
Criterion was founded in 1984 by Janus Films executives Aleen Stein, Robert Stein, and Roger Smith as a laserdisc-format release operation. Laserdiscs — large-format optical discs that predated DVDs by roughly fifteen years — were a niche home-video format with significantly higher visual quality than VHS but a small consumer base. Criterion's earliest releases (Citizen Kane, King Kong, A Hard Day's Night) were premium laserdisc editions targeted at the small audience that could afford laserdisc players.
What Criterion did from its launch that distinguished it from other video distributors was the level of supplemental content. Audio commentaries from directors and critics. Behind-the-scenes documentaries. Essay booklets. Restored-print sources. The packaging treated each film as an art object rather than as a commodity. The model was, in 1984, structurally unusual and would, over the following decades, become the template for premium home-video distribution generally.
The transition to DVD in the late 1990s expanded Criterion's potential audience by an order of magnitude. The DVD's lower production cost and broader consumer adoption meant the company could profitably release films at a much wider scale. The catalogue grew from roughly 200 titles in 1998 to over 1,000 by 2010. The expansion included significant foreign-language work (Japanese New Wave, French New Wave, German New Wave, Italian neorealism), restored classical American cinema, and contemporary art-house releases.
The audio-commentary tradition matured during this period. Criterion's commentary tracks — typically recorded with the director, the cinematographer, the screenwriter, the editor, or film scholars — have become a primary archive of working-filmmaker reflection on their own films. The commentary tracks for Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick refuses commentary; the track is by his collaborators), The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson), Brazil (Terry Gilliam), and many others are widely regarded as essential viewing alongside the films themselves.
Criterion launched the Criterion Channel as a standalone streaming service in 2019, after the dissolution of its earlier FilmStruck partnership with Turner Classic Movies. The Channel currently offers a rotating subset of approximately 2,000 films — including the entire Criterion Collection and various supplementary curated programming — for a monthly subscription cost roughly equivalent to a streaming service tier.
The Channel's market positioning is unusual. It is, structurally, the only major American streaming service whose catalogue is curated for serious-cinema viewers rather than for broad-demographic appeal. The platform's recommendation algorithm prioritises curatorial themes (director retrospectives, national cinema overviews, thematic constellations) rather than viewer-engagement metrics. The pricing model assumes the subscriber is, in some sense, paying for the curation rather than for the catalogue's size.
Criterion's influence on contemporary serious-cinema discourse is substantial. The 'Criterion Closet' video series — in which the company invites filmmakers and cultural figures into its physical collection to select and discuss the films they would take home — has become a viral cultural format. The selections by working directors (Bong Joon-ho's choices, Greta Gerwig's choices, Barry Jenkins's choices) function as taste-making documents for the broader film-literate audience.
The downside, often noted: Criterion's catalogue choices have themselves become a kind of working canon, with all the limitations of canonicity. The collection is heavily weighted toward American and European cinema; significant national cinemas (most contemporary African cinema, large parts of Latin American post-2000 cinema, contemporary Indian art cinema) are underrepresented. The collection's curatorial decisions, like any curator's, are partial.
Criterion has, across forty-one years, navigated three major format transitions (laserdisc to DVD to Blu-ray to streaming) without losing its core audience. The reason is structural: the company sells curation rather than catalogue. The actual films available through Criterion are mostly also available through other channels (public domain, library lending, occasional individual streaming-service licensing). What Criterion offers is the editorial work — the selection, the supplementary material, the consistent visual restoration, the essay programming.
This is the same business that record-label reissues like the Numero Group or independent publishers like New York Review Books are in. The product is, ultimately, the editorial judgment. Almost no contemporary streaming-only release approaches Criterion's standard for supplementary material. The Channel exists because there is a clear audience willing to pay for curated cinema in a way that Netflix and its competitors do not provide. Whether the model can survive the next major format transition — likely toward AI-assisted personal-curation services — is the open question for Criterion's next decade.