DVD Verdict

» see dvdverdict.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

DVD Verdict started in April 1999, which was the exact moment the format stopped being an early-adopter object and became something people bought weekly. Sean McGinnis was a lawyer in Chicago who liked movies, and the conceit he chose was the one closest to hand. Reviewers signed as judges and each review got a case number, like a docket entry. The closing paragraph was a sentence handed down in the language of a ruling, legally shaped enough to be funny without ever becoming a bit that got in the way of the actual information.

That information was the point. A DVD review in 1999 was not a film review. The film had been out for years in most cases, and what the reader needed to know was whether the transfer was anamorphic and whether the extras justified paying for a film they already owned on tape. DVD Verdict ran a large bench of volunteer critics who covered the discs nobody was assigned to cover: catalog reissues, foreign releases, television box sets, budget-label horror.

Michael Stailey took over as editor-in-chief and owner in 2004 and kept it running for twelve more years. There were sister sites for theatrical releases and for games. Then the thing being reviewed stopped mattering. Streaming ended the weekly disc purchase, the studios stopped sending screeners to a volunteer operation, and the last reviews went up in 2017. The domain stayed online for another three years with nothing new on it and went dark at the end of 2020.

Writing about transfer quality assumes a reader who is building a shelf. In Turkey through the 2000s the disc was mostly a rental or a stall purchase, and the questions this site existed to answer, whether the aspect ratio was right and whether the extras justified a second edition, were questions about an object you intended to keep. English-language film writing reached me in those years. This particular courthouse did not, and I found it the way you find most dead sites now, which is by reading about the closing rather than the run.

~ the dossier ~

~ the conceit ~

Look at any archived review and the structure is immediately legible. The Charge sets up the film in a paragraph. The Evidence is the long body, with The Rebuttal underneath it for the counterargument. Closing Statement wraps up and The Verdict hands down the ruling. A 2000 review of Papillon ends with the film released on its own recognizance due to its age, and Warner Brothers sternly reprimanded for not fixing obvious picture flaws. Down the side of the page sat the Scales of Justice, scoring video, audio, extras and acting out of a hundred.

This was a better idea than it sounds. A rigid template makes a volunteer operation possible, because a new writer does not have to invent a form, and a reader can skim forty reviews and compare them because they are all shaped identically. The joke was load-bearing. It gave a site with no budget and no editor-in-chief on salary something that looked like an institution, which is what got studios to keep sending discs to a mailing address in Chicago.

~ the day it died ~

There was no day. That is the honest reporting on this one. Nobody posted a farewell, no parent company folded it into a portfolio, and the last review simply turned out to have been the last one. Somebody kept paying for hosting for three years after the writing stopped, and then that stopped too.

It is the standard ending for a site built by people doing it for the discs rather than for money. There is no severance and no announcement, only a slow drop in posting frequency that nobody outside the masthead notices until it reaches zero. What is gone with it is close to twenty years of the only written record of thousands of DVD releases, most of them for films that have never been given a proper digital edition since. The archive is on the Wayback Machine, which is not the same as being online.

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