The Criterion Collection, Inc. (or simply Criterion) is an American home entertainment distribution company that focuses on licensing, restoring, and distributing "important classic and contemporary films". A "sister company" of arthouse film distributor Janus Films, Criterion serves film and media scholars, cinephiles, and public and academic libraries.
Criterion has helped to standardize certain aspects of home-video releases such as film restoration, the letterboxing format for widescreen films, and the inclusion of bonus features such as scholarly essays and documentary content about the films and filmmakers. Criterion most notably pioneered the use of commentary tracks.
Criterion has produced and distributed more than 1,500 special editions of its films in VHS, Betamax, LaserDisc, DVD, Blu-ray, and Ultra HD Blu-ray formats and box sets. The Criterion Collection includes titles by some 600 directors from more than 50 countries. Many of these films and their special features are also available via the Criterion Channel, an online streaming service the company has operated since April of 2019.
The Criterion Collection is considered one of the leading boutique Blu-ray labels. Each year, Criterion adds 50 to 60 titles to its catalog.
In the United States, their releases are distributed by Alliance Entertainment (no relation to the former Canadian company of the same name), via their Distribution Solutions division. In the United Kingdom, Spirit Entertainment handles distribution of Criterion titles since October 2023. UK distribution was previously through Sony Pictures Home Entertainment (SPHE) since 2016. In Canada, their releases are distributed by Unobstructed View since 2019, after their deal with Entertainment One expired.
History The company was founded in 1984 by Robert Stein, Aleen Stein, and Joe Medjuck, who later were joined by Roger Smith. In 1985, the Steins, William Becker, and Jonathan B. Turell founded the Voyager Company to publish educational multimedia CD-ROMs (1989–2000), and the Criterion Collection became a subordinate division of the Voyager Company, with Janus Films holding a minority stake in the company, and decided to expand its product on videocassettes and videodiscs.
In 1984, Citizen Kane was the first film the company released on Laserdisc, which included supplementary materials like a video essay and extensive liner notes on the provenance of the negative from which the restoration was made. In 1989, Voyager put out its first CD-ROM about Beethoven's ninth symphony. In March 1994, Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck GmbH bought 20% of Voyager for US$6.7 million; the four founders each retained a 20% owner's share.
In 1995, Aleen Stein resigned as President of Voyager, but remained a partner, and went on to found the Organa LLC multimedia publishing company. In November 1996, Bob Stein stepped down as company chief. In December 1996, it was announced Voyager would absorb Holtzbrinck's Electronic Publishing arm, with Holtzbrinck gaining two seats on Voyager's board. In 1997, the Voyager Company was dissolved.
The remaining three partners, Aleen Stein, Becker, and Turell owned the Criterion Collection company, which has a business partnership with Janus Films and had one with Home Vision Entertainment (HVE) until 2005, when Image Entertainment bought HVE. On November 4, 2013, it was announced Sony Pictures Home Entertainment (SPHE) would handle distribution. In May 2024, Janus Films and Criterion were acquired by Steven Rales, founder of Indian Paintbrush.
Home Vision Entertainment In 1986, Charles Benton founded Home Vision Entertainment (HVE), the home-video division of Public Media Inc. (PMI), which he had previously founded in 1968. The HVE company sold, advertised, marketed, and distributed Criterion Collection DVDs, and also sold its own HVE brand of DVDs (co-produced with Criterion), including The Merchant Ivory Collection and the Classic Collection, a joint venture between HVE and Janus Films. The latter enterprise published HVE imprint films, for which Janus Films owned the video rights, but were unavailable from the Criterion Collection; however, Criterion published the Classic Collection films. In 2005, Image Entertainment bought HVE, making it the exclusive distributor of Criterion Collection products until 2013.
Online ventures and marketing The Criterion Collection began to provide video-on-demand (VOD) in partnership with Mubi (formerly The Auteurs) in 2008. In February 2011, Criterion began switching its VOD offerings exclusively to Hulu Plus. In November 2016, FilmStruck, a film streaming service from Turner Classic Movies (TCM), succeeded Hulu as the exclusive streaming service for the Criterion Collection. Some Criterion films were streamed by Kanopy. In October 2018, Warner Bros. Digital Networks and Turner announced that FilmStruck would shut down on November 29. Criterion stated in a blog post that it was "trying to find ways we can bring our library and original content back to the digital space as soon as possible".
On November 16, 2018, Criterion announced the launch of the Criterion Channel as a standalone service, wholly owned and operated by the Criterion Collection, in the US and Canada. The service launched in 2019. Through a multi-year deal with HBO Max, some of Criterion's offerings are also available on the HBO streaming platform.
British film magazine Sight & Sound revealed in its April 2016 issue that Criterion would be expanding its releases to the UK. The first six titles were released on April 18, 2016.
The Criterion Closet is a film closet containing every title distributed by Criterion. It is located in Criterion's Manhattan headquarters and was made from a disused bathroom. Since 2010, Criterion regularly uploads videos of prominent film directors and actors (such as Martin Scorsese and Cate Blanchett) selecting films from the closet on their official YouTube channel. The first guest to be recorded in the closet was director Guillermo del Toro. In 2024, Criterion introduced a 18-foot delivery van containing all 1,500 films, the Criterion Closet, to celebrate its 40th anniversary.
In July 2025, Criterion agreed to pay US$4.5 million to settle a class action lawsuit alleging it unlawfully shared subscriber information with third parties including Meta and Twilio.
In February 2026, it was announced that two Netflix releases, Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein and KPop Demon Hunters, were being added to the Criterion Collection, given both films' Academy Award nominations and the latter becoming Netflix's most popular film. Original Netflix titles are largely limited to streaming, but partnership with Criterion allows them to receive physical releases. This first happened in 2020 with Roma (spine #1014), followed by Marriage Story (spine #1038), and The Irishman (spine #1058).
In April 2026, Criterion’s The Wes Anderson Archive: Ten Films, Twenty-Five Years box set won the "Title of the Year" award at the annual Home Entertainment Media Play Awards.
Contributions and influence Letterboxing With its eighth LaserDisc release, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Criterion introduced the letterbox format, which added black bars to the top and bottom of the 4:3 standard television set to preserve the original aspect ratio of the film, rather than cropping the image to fit a standard television display. Thereafter, Criterion made letterboxing the standard presentation for all its releases of films shot in widescreen aspect ratios.
Commentary soundtracks In 1984, the Criterion Collection's second LaserDisc title, King Kong (1933), was the debut of the scene-specific audio commentary contained in a separate analog channel of the LaserDisc, in which American film historian Ronald Haver spoke about the production, cast, screenplay, production design, and special effects. He also provides commentary on the LaserDisc editions of Casablanca (1942), Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941), Singin' in the Rain (1952),, and The Wizard of Oz (1939).
Typically, the chapter-indexed commentaries are exclusive to the Criterion releases and their initial DVD reissues; they became collector's items when the original studios reissued titles previously licensed to Criterion, regardless of whether new commentary tracks were produced.
Adding directors' commentary tracks as bonus material was another Criterion innovation. Some of the earliest were recorded by Martin Scorsese for the Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and Lucky Me LaserDiscs from Criterion.
Special editions The Criterion Collection began in 1984 with the releases of Citizen Kane (1941) and then King Kong (1933) on LaserDisc, the latter's source negatives courtesy of the Library of Congress. The company later became known for pioneering the "special edition" DVD concept containing bonus materials such as trailers, commentaries, documentaries, alternate endings, and deleted scenes. The success of these releases established the special-edition version in the DVD business. In 2007, taking advantage of advanced film-transfer and film-restoration technologies, Criterion published higher-quality versions, with bonus materials, of early catalog titles such as Amarcord (1973), Brazil (1985), and Seven Samurai (1954).
Film restoration Originally, the Criterion Collection focused on releasing world cinema, mainstream cinema classics, and critically successful obscure films. Using the best available source materials, the company produced technologically improved and cleaner versions, such as those for The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), M (1931), Children of Paradise (1945), The Third Man (1949), Seven Samurai (1954), and Amarcord (1973).
Almost every title contains film-cleaning and film-restoration essays in the booklets, while some even have featurettes comparing the restored and unrestored images. In 1989, the company released Ghostbusters (1984), a controversial choice at the time, as it was a comedy starring Bill Murray that grossed more than $200 million at the box office. In an attempt to "curb its stuffy image," Criterion increasingly released art, genre, and mainstream movies on LaserDisc, such as Halloween (1978) in 1994, Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), Armageddon (1998) in 1999, and The Rock (1996) in 2001.
Licenses Some previously licensed Criterion Collection titles, such The Harder They Come (1972), have gone out of print. Titles such as RoboCop (1987), Hard Boiled (1992), The Killer (1989), and Grand Illusion (1937) became unavailable when their publishing licenses expired or when Criterion published improved versions, such as those for Beauty and the Beast (1946), M (1931), The Wages of Fear (1953), and Seven Samurai (1954). over 200 of the 384 titles from the List of Criterion Collection Laserdisc releases have been re-released.Criterion Collection on Laserdisc
Another example is the film Charade (1963), which had become a public-domain property for lacking the legally-required copyright notice. Criterion produced a restored edition under license from Universal Pictures for the initial edition and for the later anamorphic widescreen re-release edition of the film.
Periodically, Criterion releases material on DVD and Blu-ray disc licensed from the studios with whom the company had previously dealt (such as Universal's and Terry Gilliam's 1985 film Brazil); these new releases are generally undertaken on a case-by-case basis.
Criterion released its first Walt Disney Pictures title, Andrew Stanton's WALL-E (2008), in 2022. This was not the result of an ongoing deal between Disney (who has maintained a relationship with the distributor for titles from Touchstone Pictures and, since 2019, 20th Century Studios) and Criterion, but rather licensed as a one-off, with Stanton approaching Criterion and "wanting to be part of the club".