Is Shout Factory getting out of the physical media business?
Home video distributor Shout! Factory and their horror sublabel Scream Factory are very popular among physical media collectors, as they have brought us some amazing special editions of some great movies over the years… but now, strange things are afoot at the company and it has some fans worried that they might be getting out of the physical media business within the next year. Of course, it doesn’t help that someone went on the Blu-ray.com forums and specifically said that the company is pivoting to streaming and getting out of the physical media business. So, what is going on over at Shout? Are they closing shop?
To find answers, we have to go back two years, to when Oaktree Capital Management acquired Shout! Studios. Recently, Shout acquired fellow boutique distributor Gravitas Ventures and Oaktree started gearing up to also acquire FilmRise, a media company with a film and television studio and a free streaming network. A new holding company called Radial Entertainment Group was founded for the merger of Shout and FilmRise, with with Shout CEO and co-founder Garson Foos serving as the CEO of Radial and FilmRise CEO and co-founder Danny Fisher being named the Executive Chairman. The merger of the companies led to a lot of layoffs (possibly 14% of the staff), which is part of what got Shout / Scream Factory fans worried that there was trouble behind the scenes – but, according to a Deadline report, it looks like it’s just “business as usual,” an unfortunate result of two companies merging. The layoffs were part of the “company-wide integration effort to identify redundancies and streamline operations, re-positioning Radial for long-term growth.” This long-term growth will involve Radial seeking to “elevate our company as an innovator and thought leader in the digital streaming industry,” as the company has a library of over 70,000 titles and episodes to send out into the world, but doesn’t mean there won’t be physical media releases to look forward to as well.
The Shout website has started running some major sales and it was recently announced that they’re ending their Physical Media Forever loyalty program. Subscribers were encouraged to use their credits by the end of October, as they’ll be transitioning to a new way of issuing store credit as of November 3rd. There are definitely changes going on at the company that haven’t been explained yet… but again, that doesn’t mean there won’t be more Blu-ray and 4K releases in the future. In fact, Disc-Connected reports, “I know of multiple big PHYSICAL MEDIA projects coming from Shout in 2026. They are not getting out of physical media tomorrow.“
This would seem to be an odd time for them to get out of the physical media game, as Shout! recently acquired the worldwide rights (excluding select Asian territories) to the Golden Princess movie library, giving them access to a treasure trove of 156 Hong Kong cinema classics. Under the Hong Kong Cinema Classics label, they’ve been dropping a lot of physical media releases, all of which appear to be selling exceptionally well. So we can probably expect to see them continuing to get all they can out of that label and the Golden Princess library for the foreseeable future.
So, is Shout Factory getting out of the physical media business? The company is changing and expanding, and there’s certainly going to be a lot of streaming involved in that, but it doesn’t seem likely that they’ll be closing the door on physical media entirely. It will be interesting to see what happens next.
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