Thanks to YouTube and a proliferation of streaming services, it’s easy to feel like we have access to infinite content and that anything once produced might be found again. But that’s just not true. There are shows that haven’t aired in decades because of the weird nature of music copyrights, and films trapped in warehouses somewhere forgotten by all but the most ardent fans. There are also companies who find these projects, license them, and sell copies to collectors and the nostalgic. You’ve heard of Criterion and its coveted closet, and there’s others like the U.K.’s Arrow and Australia’s Umbrella. But after Criterion, the biggest U.S. boutique distributor is Shout! Factory, which has never been as strict an adherent to the cinephile’s code. Instead Shout! spent years making sure that the movies and shows you can’t find online could still be found on physical media. Perhaps slowly forgotten, but not lost.
Shout! started in 2002, when it still cost over $100 to buy a whole season of The X-Files on DVD. The company, founded by three record label execs, was originally intended to be a retro music label. Then in 2004, it licensed Freaks And Geeks. It was the first time the cult classic show from Judd Apatow and Paul Feig was released, and at just 18 episodes it was an expensive release for the still nascent DVD distributor. They followed the then-trend of loading the set with extras and making sure that the collection warranted the cost. Consequently Freaks And Geeks: The Fan Edition was “simply the finest TV-related boxed set ever created, plain and simple,” according to a DVDTalk review.
Shout! Factory grew quickly, licensing shows that would often be ignored by other distributors at the time, like SCTV and Home Movies. By 2006, its niche was secured with deals that allowed it to release a whole host of kid’s cartoons from DIC, including Heathcliff And The Catillac Cats and Inspector Gadget, and retro TV—which, in the early 2000s, meant old shows like McHale’s Navy and Ironside. It secured itself in other genres too, including under a new label for horror releases called Scream Factory. One of the more niche genres Shout! embraced was tokusatsu. That’s the live-action superhero shows out of Japan, like Super Sentai, that usually came to the U.S. chopped up and heavily Americanized (see the entire Power Rangers franchise).
In the mid-2010s, Shout! Factory jumped on the same bandwagon bigger distributors and studios were on: After securing the rights to Mystery Science Theater 3000, it announced a Kickstarter in 2015 to make new episodes and created a studio to develop its own content. That was the same year it launched ad-supported streaming channels full of the old shows it had diligently been licensing for more than a decade. At the time, free ad-supported television (also called FAST TV) was primarily limited to streaming services from random TV manufacturers and Roku, but as streaming subscriptions steadily increased in price, FAST TV audiences grew, and with that growth came more value to Shout! Factory’s enormous library. “We had programming that was compelling, and Pluto, Tubi, Roku and Amazon were trying to get high-quality, recognizable content, really cheap,” Greg Pao, executive VP of strategy and digital, told Variety in 2023. “And unlike a lot of people who were hesitant to jump in there, we said, ‘Why not?’”
So, the library kept growing. Given the company was already on the B-TV and kids’ TV train, it was a natural fit to embrace B-movies. Shout! Factory signed a deal with American B-movie father Roger Corman in 2018. In 2020, it nabbed the rights to the Ultra series, a mega tokusatsu franchise. In 2022, it not only secured the rights to ALF (remember ALF?) but announced plans to resurrect the cat-eating alien franchise. Showing an apparent love of puppets, Shout! Factory made a deal with the Jim Henson company later that year. It couldn’t have The Muppets (Disney holds a grip on those rights), but it got Farscape and as a nerd I’d argue that’s just as valuable.
On the kids’ entertainment side, Shout! seemed to move from nostalgic childhood faves of Generation X and millennials to legitimately great films, like the works of Laika and Studio Ghibli. Streaming and a burgeoning theatrical distribution arm were making the company far more money than the DVDs it had made its name on. In 2023, Shout! Factory announced a big change to mark its 20th anniversary: It would now be called Shout! Studios. It wasn’t just a celebratory move, but a tactical one. Shout! Factory/Studios wanted everyone to know it was no longer just in the business of physical media distribution. “It’s less and less of our business all the time,” CEO Garson Foos told Variety. He then noted that just “30 to 35% of our business will be physical” in 2023.
Coincidentally, 2023 was also the year Oaktree Capital, a private equity firm, made a major investment in Shout! Factory. That influx of cash is what allowed Shout! to go on a licensing spree focused more on FAST content than physical media. Which explains the otherwise bizarre decision to license a load of no-name TruTV reality content from Nash Entertainment in 2024. In 2025, Oaktree Capital then acquired FilmRise and smooshed it together with Shout! Studios. On paper, the merger made sense—both companies had a big library of old shows that FAST networks wanted to stream and both were now owned by Oaktree Capital.
But Shout! wasn’t just known for having a big library of old stuff. It was also well-known for the care and consideration it put into the physical releases of that library. The merger made people nervous, but the announcement that soon followed left physical media fans terrified. Shout! announced it would no longer be selling physical media directly; instead it would sell what it licensed through GRUV, a store managed by Universal Pictures. The rumors of Shout Factory’s imminent demise got so bad TheWrap reached out to the company to check on its standing, which was how many learned of the FilmRise merger and just how entrenched private equity was into a once-fun little business.
A year later, Shout! Studios’ identity is hard to define. There’s all of the stuff being shoved onto Roku and the rest, but it’s also still releasing boutique Blu-rays and DVDs, and those releases continue to be of generally high quality. Over the last few years it’s started leaning heavily into Hong Kong cinema, which is how I got a beautiful release of Peking Opera Blues earlier this year. It was restored directly from the film negative and features a solid array of extras, including a new interview with the cinematographer, a commentary from a film historian, and a lovely little book containing an essay on the film and plenty of photos. It’s the kind of release of a classic foreign language film I’ve longed for in the United States. Just looking at the case itself gives me a smile.
Yet that’s something that’s become almost unexpected from Shout! Factory. After its private equity acquisition, Shout! Factory is now another deep-pocketed distributor fighting over licenses to popular shows and movies everyone has heard of instead of fun little cult classics. Its strength was always in the way it seemed to zig while others zagged. Not long after my copy of Peking Opera Blues arrived, the tokusatsu community went into mourning. Shout! had lost the rights to Super Sentai—not only on physical media, but streaming. Anyone watching it on Roku was out of luck. “You always think you have more time…until you don’t,” one redditor said upon the announcement.
For years, Shout! Factory gave people the time they needed to buy and watch lost shows. In some cases it still does. But the boutique Blu-ray distributor has a new owner now. It’s still making great products, but it’s no longer quite the same resource for finding the shows we thought were lost.
Alex Cranz writes about the intersection of technology and pop culture.
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