Welcome to my monthly “Failures” column, where I look back at some of the films I could, would, maybe even should have watched last month… but failed to.

Project Hail Mary merits a mention right off the bat, as the Ryan Gosling-starring sci-fi adaptation is apparently the highest-grossing film of the year so far. I’m sure there’ll be a kids’ animation along at some point to overtake that, but it remains noteworthy for the time being. I heard somewhere that there’s a twist and/or twists that are better unspoiled, so I’ve not read a whole lot about it… not that I read much about any new releases nowadays, to be honest. A lot of my understanding of “significance” nowadays is wholly vibes based on what I pick up or overhear here and there.

And in that spirit, other films of note on the big screen — at least as far as I’m aware — include a new Pixar, Hoppers. Obviously they’re a studio rather than a franchise, so I don’t know that I really need to “catch up” on their output, but nonetheless, that now makes eight Pixar films I need to catch up on. Sticking to family movies, Enid Blyton adaptation The Magic Faraway Tree seems to be one of those films that has crossed over to ‘regular people’ (certainly, work colleagues have talked about it, and they almost never talk about films). The other perennial big screen success story is horror, which this month has a somewhat comedic bent (as far as I can tell) between Maggie Gyllenhaal’s take on Frankenstein, The Bride!, and sequel Ready or Not 2: Here I Come. While I have other releases noted down, I know even less about them than the ones I’ve already mentioned, so can do little more than reel off their titles: Mother’s Pride, Reminders of Him, Dead Man’s Wire, Midwinter Break, Arco, Splitsville, They Will Kill You…

Plus, straddling the cinema / streaming original divide, the return of a certain Birmingham-based crime saga in Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man, the popularity of which meant it managed to attract some press for its limited theatrical release (more than most cinema-bound Netflix titles seem to manage) before debuting on Netflix later in the month. Rather than watch that, I finally got round to the sixth series of the show itself. Strong chance the film crops up in my April viewing, then.

The only other direct-to-streaming premiere I have noted down for last month is another Netflix original, War Machine, although they did debut I Swear shortly after it provoked all that controversy at the BAFTAs, so that’s probably more noteworthy. I don’t even have any such streaming premieres noted down for Amazon Prime Video, so either they had a barren March or their offering entirely passed me by. NOW led the way in that regard, as usual, with the likes of Nobody 2 and Materialists, before ending the month with Best Picture victor One Battle After Another. And, as if to bring us full circle back to the high grossers, Disney+ rustled up last year’s big box office winner, Zootropolis 2.

Prime did continue to do what they do best, however, which is cycle through a tonne of back catalogue stuff. Ones that caught my eye this past month included Luc Besson’s The Big Blue, demonic Keanu Reeves / Al Pacino legal drama The Devil’s Advocate, Yorgos Lanthimos’s Dogtooth, and a couple of silents in the form of the 1925 adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World and the Douglas Fairbanks iteration of The Three Musketeers. Similarly, iPlayer proffered Aftersun (I suppose it must leave iPlayer sometimes so that it can come back), Jodie Comer-starring eco-thriller The End We Start From, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza… plus a whole bunch of other stuff, across both of them, but (as always) if I were to list everything we’d be here forever.

But, for my traditional segue into all the new Blu-rays I bought this month, here’s some stuff I already own on disc that popped up — both things I’ve never seen and stuff that’s overdue a rewatch. On Netflix, Bad Boys: Ride or Die and Sleepy Hollow. On Prime, The Chronicles of Riddick, Crimson Peak, The Dreamers, The Last Samurai, The Silence of the Lambs, and Unforgiven. On iPlayer, Christopher Nolan’s Insomnia, The Martian, Master and Commander, The Third Man, Training Day, and, perhaps most egregiously of all, How the West Was Won, which I remember buying as one of my first-ever Blu-rays to show off the format. I wonder how that disc holds up today? Maybe someday I’ll actually watch it and find out…

My bank balance would like it if such a backlog compelled me to stop buying new releases. Alas, I am weak-willed, and so this month I splashed out on another veritable pile of discs. The headliner for me was John Woo’s action classic Hard Boiled. At one point it looked like this was a film we’d never see on disc again, and now we have it in what is reportedly a beautiful 4K restoration. Between titles like that (and its label brethren, such as The Killer, coming in April) and the Doctor Who TV movie also restored in 4K, 2026 is shaping up to be a year of ‘impossible’ releases. Heck, you can throw Stranger Things getting a complete series physical release in that category, too.

Otherwise, there was a surprising horror bent to this month’s acquisitions, between Hammer’s Fear in the Night from StudioCanal, the original adaptation of Salem’s Lot from Arrow, French classic The Devil’s Hand from Masters of Cinema, and a new UK 4K of the original Suspiria; plus I also picked up the Warners Archive editions of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, both 1931 and 1941 versions, replacing an old DVD double-bill. Even the non-horror titles sound kind of horror-y, like Stolen Face (another from famously horror-centric studio Hammer, but billed as a “macabre melodrama”), or Radiance’s yakuza drama Blood of Revenge (putting “blood” in the title immediately evokes horror flicks, no?), or Masters of Cinema’s Cruel Tale of Bushido (what films are “cruel” if not horror?) Well, maybe I’m stretching a point, I don’t know.

There was one more Hammer title, in another genre again: ’50s sci-fi Spaceways. I don’t know if their current release schedule is deliberately designed to remind / inform us that Hammer did more than just the horror pictures for which they’re primarily remembered, but it feels like that might be the goal. Sticking with sci-fi, I belatedly picked up the 4K of Minority Report (it only came out in February, but I feel like I’m late to the party if I haven’t preordered something, or at least bought it during release week), plus Edgar Wright’s re-adaptation of The Running Man, the only brand-new film in this month’s selection. Rounding things out, a bevy of martial arts films, from Eureka’s The Invincible Eight to Arrow’s box set of Eiichi Kudo’s Samurai Revolution Trilogy.

These kinds of releases — all the things I’ve bought, really — get me excited when I read about them and place my order. Someday I need to translate that excitement into actually watching more of them.