Ruthless People is one of the best comedies and it even has a song at the beginning by Mick Jagger. Danny DeVito is hilarious and Bette Midler does one of her best roles, like she did in Hocus Pocus.
It also has roles well played by Judge Reinhold, Helen Slater, Bill Pullman, and Anita Morris.
Monsters from the Id
It's so annoying how many movies have no blu-ray still. The main few I wish were available are this one, virgin suicides (in the US, anyway, there was none), and several of Christina Ricci's early movies, such as Addams Family Values.
shareUnfortunately Blu-ray has never taken off in the way that VHS and DVD did. To this say, 14 years after the introduction of Blu-ray, DVDs still outsell them. Streaming services makes matters even worse for Blu-ray.
On the one hand, it's satisfying that Blu-ray was never the success that it was expected to be, because it's a highly annoying proprietary Sony format that has ridiculous levels of encryption that can make it difficult or impossible to watch your own movies that you bought and paid for, and even if you can get them to work today, there's no guarantee you can get them to work tomorrow because of the ever-changing encryption/protection schemes. Also, Blu-ray licensing is expensive, which is why most Blu-rays are more expensive than their DVD counterparts.
On the other hand, the picture quality is [potentially] fantastic; it's comparable to the picture quality of a 35mm theatrical film print, something which is highly impractical, expensive, bulky, heavy, and not even quite legal to own.
Ruthless People exists in HD already, so it would be very easy and cheap to release it on Blu-ray (because the expensive process of cleaning and scanning the film to HD digital video has already been done). If it ever gets released on Blu-ray, it will probably be from a specialty company like Shout Factory. They've released a lot of movies on Blu-ray that are more obscure than Ruthless People; Cohen & Tate (1988) for example.
It's a bit of a mystery since it pulled in pretty big money at the time and got great reviews. I can only imagine it's now considered one of those "forgotten gems" from the 80s.
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