Eli Roth’s Ice Cream Man is the cinematic disaster of the year that just keeps on sinking to new lows in increasingly fascinating ways. In the lead-up to the film’s release, there were plenty of reasons to be excited and interested in this new horror feature from the veteran horror filmmaker. While his previous few films had been far from heralded, Ice Cream Man was being sold as a ‘return to form’ in many ways, with the director having recently struck out on his own, founded his own media company in the form of The Horror Section, and essentially producing and distributing this new film on his own terms.
Of course, all of that goodwill was thrown out of the window in the week leading up to the film’s release, during which the film not only netted blisteringly negative reviews from critics and audiences alike, but it was also controversially revealed that Roth utilized extensive amounts of AI-generated footage and then lied to people about it in an attempt to cover it up.
Things only got worse once the film hit theaters and the truth of the matter was revealed to anyone with a working set of eyes and ears; the film was well and truly atrocious and flopped at the box office. Now, it looks like Roth is attempting to recoup some of those losses in a truly bizarre way: by charging a ridiculous amount for anyone looking to buy Ice Cream Man on physical media.
Physical media has been in a state of ebb-and-flow for the past several years now. The advent and widespread popularization of streaming services led to a substantial downward turn for the sales of things like DVDs and Blu-rays, as people gained the ability to access numerous titles from a single monthly subscription fee. This led to many of the most popular retailers electing to stop carrying such physical media options altogether, which only made average consumers all the more reliant on streaming services in turn, creating this perverse kind of feedback loop that served to benefit the conglomerates behind the streaming platforms themselves far more than it did audiences.
Fortunately, there are still some fantastic physical media distributors out there, from the Criterion Collection to Vinegar Syndrome to Arrow Video. In fact, such options have played an integral role in the whole concept of buying films on DVD, Blu-ray, and 4K, seeing an uptick in the past few years. As streaming services have decreased in quality and options while increasing their pricing, many people are realizing the value of actually owning the media they love in a whole new way.
I say all of this to say I am a defender of physical media; I love physical media. But the fact that Eli Roth and co. are attempting to charge nearly $70 USD for a “collector’s edition” Blu-ray/4K of Ice Cream Man is absolute lunacy and outright embarrassing.
The average price of a new Blu-ray release in 2026 can range from $25 to $35 depending on the specifics of the product. Bespoke releases from those aforementioned physical media distributors can hit higher marks than that, but that is often a result of the restoration efforts that have gone into recent conversions for classic or cult films. Even then, though, a Criterion 4K runs about $40. This makes the fact that retailers have Ice Cream Man marked for a $65 price point insane.
For starters, I pity the soul who feels the need to own this film at all, even if it's just out of some morbid sense of obligation. I understand enjoying a bad movie; there's nothing wrong with that, but there’s a whole host of other awful things involved in Ice Cream Man, including the god-awful AI usage, which would prevent me from ever even considering having this thing on my shelf. But charging a price that is equivalent to two standard Blu-rays for this awful thing, at a price higher than any single Criterion release? That’s the kind of egregious, money-hungry move that should scare away even the most devoted of completionists.
This price is undoubtedly a move on Roth and The Horror Section’s part to try and maximize profits, but it’s likely to have the opposite effect. I can’t imagine there are more than a dozen people in the whole world willing to shell out this kind of cash for such an awful product at this moment in time, and that’s going to show in the product’s sales. Were it priced normally, I think there’s a good chance people who missed this in theaters might try to check it out. But like this? The choice is actively scaring people off and deflating any and all potential profits.
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