I've been waiting on this one for a while. The Criterion Collection is bringing Philip Kaufman's The Right Stuff to 4K Ultra HD, which means one of the great American epics of the '80s is finally getting the physical release it's deserved for decades. Per the report, the disc lands in November. I've already checked my shelf space.

If you've never seen it, The Right Stuff is Kaufman's 1983 adaptation of Tom Wolfe's book about the Mercury Seven, the first astronauts, and the test pilots who thought riding a rocket was somehow a step down from breaking the sound barrier in a plane you barely controlled. It runs over three hours. It swings wildly from deadpan comedy to genuine awe, and it has maybe the best opening stretch of any film in its decade: Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier in the California desert while the rest of the world wonders if it can be done at all.

The movie won four Oscars, sits in the mid-90s on Rotten Tomatoes, and still feels like a secret somehow. People who love it really love it. Sam Shepard's laid-back Yeager, Ed Harris as John Glenn, Dennis Quaid doing the most charming riff on Gordon Cooper imaginable, Fred Ward, Scott Glenn, Barbara Hershey, Jeff Goldblum showing up in bits as a recruiter who keeps discovering the Russians are ahead of us. The cast goes about fifteen deep and there's not a weak link in it.

What makes it special, and why Criterion is the right home for it, is that it's one of the few big-budget American films that treats heroism with total sincerity and a raised eyebrow at the same time. Kaufman never mocks these men, but he never lets you forget the machine around them, the press circus, the politics of which pilot gets picked and why. It's a movie about mythmaking that also believes in the thing being mythologized. Almost nobody pulls that off.

No word yet on the full extras lineup, but Criterion rarely drops something this big without a proper restoration and some new conversation pieces, so keep an eye out. The transfer is the main event anyway. This is a film shot with real planes, real desert light and real scale, and 4K is exactly what it's been waiting for. Bill Conti's score, which swells like it's trying to launch its own rocket, deserves the audio bump too.

I've spent this whole year telling you the theatrical experience matters, and it does, but physical media is the other half of that argument. Streaming catalogs come and go, bitrates get compressed, and then one day the movie you love is just gone from the service. A disc doesn't do that to you. I said it with the Kill Bill box set and I'll say it again: if a movie this size matters to you, own it.

If you're building a night around it, pair it with Top Gun for the hot-pilot energy, or Apollo 13 if you want to stay in the actual space program. But The Right Stuff is the one those movies grew up admiring.

November. 4K. Preorder it or set a reminder, whatever works. The stuff is finally right.