August—2025. The new limited edition 4K Blu-ray of the 2003 film Master and Commander has sold out everywhere. Secondary markets are now battlefields.
There are two kinds of people in this world: those who read the above sentences and feel an intense pain and yearning for camaraderie and combat on the high seas, and those who have never seen Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World.
Copies of the new 4K release of the film are now selling on eBay for roughly double its MSRP, proof that physical media is not dead.
Released in 2003, Master and Commander is a war movie set in the Napoleonic period that focuses on the relationship between Captain Jack Aubrey of the Royal Navy and ship’s surgeon Stephen Maturin, played by Russell Crowe and Paul Bettany respectively. The film, which is based on a 20-book-long novel series of the same name, grossed $212 million on a $150 million budget but didn’t become a runaway hit at the time.
But in the two decades since it first hit screens, Master and Commander has grown in esteem, especially in American national security circles. It’s a cult favorite. The occasional live screenings at revival theaters routinely sell out, memes involving the film’s opening text are ubiquitous, and it often lands on lists of the the “best movies of the 2000s.” In the middle of July, a joint venture of Sony and Disney studios announced it would publish a high quality 4K UltraHD limited edition steelbook Blu-ray to be released in August. Fans went nuts.
This would be the highest quality home release of the beloved film ever seen. Fans tracked pre-orders as they went live on Amazon, Wal-Mart, and other retailers. It sold out in days, and has done so consistently every time it’s been restocked. Master and Commander heads are so hungry for 4K Crowe that they’re now paying double and triple the asking price for the steelbook copy on eBay and several notable people have posted about how they can’t find a copy.
totally missed that there was a new master and commander 4K out and naturally it is completely out of stock
— jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) 2025-08-13T20:04:19.823Z
It’s rare in 2025 that the physical release of a 20 year old film is met with such fervor. Delight is especially high among members of America’s military community. Soldiers, officers, journalists, and the extremely online NatSec weirdos love Master and Commander. Like Star Wars, the movie has become a lingua franca in U.S. military circles where it’s a source of memes and concepts that drives discussion.
“There's no doubt that Master and Commander is beloved within the national security community. What's harder to explain is ‘why,’” Robert Farley, a senior lecturer at the University of Kentucky, told 404 Media. Farley said he just rewatched the movie two weeks ago after forcing a friend to watch who’d never seen it.
“If I had to hazard a guess, it's because the movie depicts the tight functioning of a community of warfighters, a community that is mostly comfortable with itself…and yet is deeply grounded in English social structure,” Farley said. “As in any well-functioning military, everyone has a place to be and a job to do. Jack Aubrey isn’t so much brilliant as ‘lucky,’ which adds to the workmanlike aspect. I'd say that there's a male bonding aspect to it (I don't believe any female character has even a single line), but I know plenty of women in the NatSec space who will quote ‘Oceans are battlefields’ in everyday conversation.”
Pauline Shanks Kaurin, a former military ethics professor at the U.S. Naval War College, told 404 Media that she’d used Master and Commander in her classes as a way to teach Aristotle’s three kinds of friendship and, separately, the Ethics of Care. “I think it’s really about the friendship between the Captain and doctor, as well as a portrayal of leadership and comradeship that is still masculine and strong, but not brutal and gratuitous,” she said.
When reached for comment about the film, Remap Radio’s Robert Zacny—famously a fan of the film—was actively debating paying $140 for a copy of the 4K steelbook. 404 Media informed Zacny that eBay had listings for half that price and asked the Remap founder for his thoughts on the movie and its enduring legacy.
“There's a moment in the film where Aubrey snaps at Maturin about the things that hold together their ‘little wooden world.’ Master and Commander is a war movie where the entire concerns of the world are reduced to the interior or a single ship. But it's also a character study about the worlds held within and between individuals. The roles people have to inhabit and the things they have to do in service to duty, the state, to ethics, to morality.
Yet this movie is also backdropped by the vastness and wonder of nature, of time considered on an evolutionary scale and the awareness that beyond that bubble of consciousness awaits eternity in the darkness of the sea. The oft-memed opening text is deceptive. It doesn't really matter that Napoleon is the master of Europe. The concept of a battlefield is meaningless to the ocean. The movie is about men waging battles inside themselves to reconcile their own contradictions and choose their own meaning. It's immaculately directed, acted, and scored, but so are a lot of movies. This one endures because it's always offering a berth on this voyage of introspection, and it's so much fun you don't even mind how insistently it reminds you to think about mortality.”
His thoughts exhausted, Remap’s founder pressed 404 Media for information. “Now link me some of these good deals on steelbooks,” he said. “I am gonna be buried with one.”
