What was the first movie released on Blu-ray?
Cast your mind back to the heady days of 2006. If you were a physical media connoisseur back then, you would have been aware of a vicious war that was brewing. It pitted two high-definition optical disc formats against each other, both promising to make the DVD a relic of the past. In one corner, there was the HD-DVD, and in the other, we had Blu-ray, and the home video market wasn’t big enough for the both of them.
Naturally, as anyone with even a passing familiarity with the modern media landscape knows, Blu-ray easily won that war, with HD-DVD ceasing to exist within two short years. However, Blu-ray didn’t truly make DVDs obsolete, either. That honour instead belonged to the streaming revolution, which arguably rendered DVD and Blu-Ray discs little more than expensive coasters as of the year 2025.
Indeed, even though DVDs and Blu-Rays are still produced today, and specific boutique labels have succeeded in making high-end versions of both, it can’t be denied that neither is the cultural force they once were. Nevertheless, there will always be a hardcore kind of cinephile who will pay the big bucks to watch their movies in the best picture quality possible, and they’ll argue you can’t get that with streaming. So, this means Blu-ray, and its fancier counterpart 4K, are here to stay…for now.
Indeed, the backstory of Blu-ray as a format is a fairly fascinating one. It is unique in that, unlike the DVD or VHS, its success can be attributed specifically to one company: Sony. You see, when Microsoft was putting together its Xbox 360 console for release in late 2005, it didn’t include a Blu-ray disc drive, instead choosing to support HD-DVD.
Sony, on the other hand, backed Blu-ray, and when its Playstation 3 was released in late 2006, the company, which also, of course, has a thriving movie division, ran an excellent marketing campaign letting consumers know these newfangled discs could be played on the PS3 they were already intending to buy. This is why, although there is no one movie that was the first Blu-ray ever released, six of the first seven titles were all Sony Pictures, and what a ragtag bunch they were, too.
On June 20th, 2006, Sony launched the new format with a smattering of movies ranging from “great” (House of Flying Daggers, The Fifth Element) to “not so good” (50 First Dates, Hitch) to “what were they thinking?” (Underworld: Evolution, xXx). In addition, the company also distributed The Terminator, which is technically an MGM film.
So, there you have it: if you were there at the very inception of Blu-ray, excitedly waiting to pop a disc into your PS3 or ludicrously expensive early Blu-ray player, you had the option of watching a James Cameron sci-fi classic, a Gary Oldman sci-fi classic, a martial arts extravaganza, two middling romcoms, a braindead Vin Diesel extreme sports action vehicle, or the second part of one of the worst franchises of the ’00s/’10s. It was an inauspicious start for the fledgling format, but hey, everything has to start somewhere, right?
As an amusing postscript to this tale of the first ever Blu-ray movie, it would take until the week after these seven releases for the first genuinely new movie to debut on DVD and Blu-ray at the same time, and that was Milla Jovovich’s lamentable sci-fi action movie, Ultraviolet. That day, Heath Ledger’s A Knight’s Tale and Martin Scorsese’s seminal concert film The Last Waltz were also released, completing a truly bizarre trio for the new high-definition video format.
