I'm starting to collect secondhand blu ray/DVDs specifically for their special features and commentaries. Which films or TV shows had the best bonus features with their physical release?

Spinal Tap - the cast provides commentary in character. It's like getting a second hilarious movie free Blood Simple - The Coen Brothers pretend to be pretentious film critics and slag off the film. Also hilarious.

LOTRs extended editions. 4 seperate commentaries plus two other dvds of features and behind the scenes stuff for all three films.

Nothing better than LOTR extended sets The bonus features are basically called "The Appendices" and you will have like 25+ hours of content

Ridley Scott special edition DVDs always had incredible, in depth documentaries. Kingdom of Heaven even got its own 3 hour 15 minutes 4 disc special edition, which was fantastic and improved greatly on the theatrical movie. The 9 disc Blade Runner Blu-Ray set is incredible. Everything you need to know about the movie and with 5 different cuts of the movie.

Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. You can watch the films while it shows different tidbits of all the research they put into the films (like explaining clichés, reasons characters are named, what movie character named after, etc. Definitely worth it.

Armageddon commentary is legendary for how much Ben Affleck thought it was a piece of shit.

The Indiana Jones making ofs are great. Ebert commentaries on Casablanca, Citizen Kane and Dark City. Social Network making of doc/commentary. Broadly speaking Fincher commentaries are great.

Tropic Thunder! Robert Downey does the commentary in character

Robert Rodriguez does a fantastic couple of shorts after Once Upon a Time in Mexico.

Apocalypse Now special edition with the ‘Hearts of Darkness’ documentary is my favorite DVD

Re-Animator has a first-rate cast commentary track (I think originally from Elite's anniversary laserdisc release?) with a lot of people getting sentimental about how much they loved David Gale and Barbara Crampton describing how much her mother doesn't love that one scene. Evil Dead has a pair of excellent commentaries, one by Sam Raimi and the other by Bruce Campbell, where they occasionally mention that, if you're listening to the other guy right now, he's lying to you and I'm going to tell you what really happened. There are other wonderful moments like Paul Verhoeven narrating the best bits of Basic Instinct ("And now they are making love... and it is beautiful... BUT OH NO! SHE HAS AN ICE PICK!") or David Cronenberg watching Naked Lunch and remarking, maybe two thirds of the way through, that he hasn't seen it in years and he's having a really good time, after which he's completely silent for the rest of the movie. And it's a dumb joke that wears out its welcome after about ten seconds, but the Invader Zim DVDs that have an Irken subtitle track get full marks for effort.

Dodgeball has a pretty infamous commentary where Ben Stiller and Vince Vaughn stage a fight with the director and then walk off halfway through the movie.

T2, Step Brothers (commentary track is almost better than the movie), Total Recall

Twin Peaks Z to A had 20 hours of special features.

If you like bonus materials, the Dr. Who blu-rays are chock full of them.

I had a dvd copy of Memento. You had to do these psychological tests just to watch the movie.

The First Hellboy movie with Ron Perlman had tons of features. Literally hours of features.

Any pairing of John Carpenter and Kurt Russell results in very entertaining commentary tracks.

The AV club has a recurring segment called “commentary tracks of the damned” where they reviewed the director commentaries on really bad movies.  It might be worth skimming through to see if there’s any that look compelling  https://www.avclub.com/commentary-tracks-of-the-damned-1798209076

The Lord of the Rings extended editions are the obvious answer but genuinely nothing touches them - the appendices alone are basically a full filmmaking school across 8 hours of behind the scenes content

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Mallrats. Great commentary track. “Who’s Walt Flanagan?!?”

Lord of the Rings Extended edition (all 3 movies) adds 2 hours 5 minutes to the 3 movies runtime. All the extra content, making of, featurettes etc is over 26 hours.

Dude I am doing the same thing. Thrift shops galore! "Best" commentary tracks is a tough one. I go through the features on the back for any more I like and see who is doing it. If I like that person/crew, I but it. If it is c**** of course. Unless it is one of those Evil Dead type gimmicks, then I will be mad and spend too much money

Star Wars: Episode I (The Phantom Menace) had a really great set of DVD extras. Besides the audio commentary, deleted scenes, and trailers, there were also a lot of featurettes/other stuff on the effects, costumes, design, etc. Also there was an hour long making-of documentary which was interesting (and really confirmed that most of the problems with Episode I were squarely on George Lucas himself rather than the actors). Other than this and the Extended LoTR and Blade Runner Complete collections that other people have mentioned, other movies/sets that I remember having worthwhile extras include: Fight Club, Pearl Harbor, the Harry Potter movies, and Brazil. I probably wouldn't recommend Star Wars Ep1 or Pearl Harbor to many people (and I can't remember the last time I watched either), but the extras were pretty good. I do also feel like there are a lot of other Criterion Collection discs/sets have good extras, especially the old classic movies and foreign films, e.g.: Citizen Kane, Seven Samurai (and other Kurosawa), In the Mood for Love (and other Wong Kar-Wai movies), etc.

28 Days Later and Dawn of the Dead both had super cool extras!

Quentin Tarantino does some pretty good extras. Specifically on Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

David Fincher’s films always have good bonus content. Zodiac has a great doc on the actual murders. The various Star Wars releases have great docs too

If you like South Park, Cannibal the Musical has a commentary track with Matt Stone, Trey Parker, and some of the cast getting increasingly drunk.

Titanic is one of the cheapest blu-rays and it comes with multiple hours of behind the scenes content on every single aspect of production. It also has multiple commentary tracks including one with the Titanic historian who was consulted for the film

Saving private Ryan has quite a lot of bonus material.

Ones I remember really enjoying, as in, I watched the movie then immediately watched all the extras and probably the movie a second time with commentary track Sleeping Beauty Scooby Doo (live action) LOTR (extended ed.) Alien box set (Alien 1-4)

Michael Cera danced for an hour on the Superbad menu screen

Far Far Away Idol from Shrek 2

The commentaries on the episodes for Farscape were great. You can tell the cast members really liked being around each other

The writers' commentary on the *Night At The Museum* movies are funnier than the movies.

Dog Soldiers. The director and cast sound drunk. And they probably are.

Memento for the chronological cut of the film

Total Recall commentary with Arnold and Paul Verhoeven is awesome, really funny. Ridley Scott has excellent ones for most of his films. Michael Mann has some great one’s. John McTiernan has some good ones. Trey Parker and Matt Stone did “Drunken Commentaries” for their early movies Cannibal and Orgazmo, where they open a bunch of bottles to start the movie and are drunk by the end.

One of the resources - reviews with a high rating for extra featurettes: [https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/search?reviewType=All&searchType=advanced&movieStart=0&movieEnd=0&videoStart=0&videoEnd=0&audioStart=0&audioEnd=0&extrasStart=5&extrasEnd=5&replayStart=0&replayEnd=0&orderBy=Title&NReviews=250&page=1](https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/search?reviewType=All&searchType=advanced&movieStart=0&movieEnd=0&videoStart=0&videoEnd=0&audioStart=0&audioEnd=0&extrasStart=5&extrasEnd=5&replayStart=0&replayEnd=0&orderBy=Title&NReviews=250&page=1) Here's all with 5/5 stars, but some great releases got 4,5/5 or even 4/5 etc. from the reviewers, so it's not objective (as no ranking is), but it's a start. Some of my favourite picks were mentioned already, what's missing would be **Sin City**'s featurette when the whole movie (almost) plays in high-speed without all the post-production work done, so it's all (again: almost) on green screen. Also some (all?) releases contain the comic book subtitles for the movie, so every scene/shot is accompanied with the OG drawing from the comics, that's another unique featurette. And there's also Cine-Explore mode, something like Maximum Movie Mode or whatever others call it - the whole movie with picture-in-picture commentary, featurettes and/or camparisons to the material captured (without post-production) etc.. **Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes** also had great featurette like these, it was called IIRC Raw Cut, so the whole movie was shown without CGI - meaning we're watching people who were motion capturing for the characters (monkeys OFC). It's IMO a great way to see how much work goes into making the movie, though it helps to know some behind-the-scenes stuff before going in these feature lenght alternative versions so one can pick the most from them (as they're not accompanied by a commentary track or narration etc.). Hayao Miyazaki's documentaries are always great, *How* ***Ponyo*** *Was Born* was literally 12 hours long, and that's about making this one movie. Also these boutique labels (Arrow, 88 Films etc.) releasing Italian giallos are packing their releases with tons of interviews, [just checked](https://www.avforums.com/reviews/city-of-the-living-dead-4k-blu-ray-review.21641/) and **City of the Living Dead**'s release contains 8 hours of featurettes (not including commentaries etc.), and that's certainly not the most packed release of this type of movie there is, like **The Beyond** with [over 20 hours of extras](https://thedigitalbits.com/reviews/item/the-beyond-grindhouse-2025-uhd)... So it comes to what movies are you interested in basically, i.e. no way I'd recommend a Disney fan collecting giallos...

LOST with its original dvd releases had fantastic and complex easter eggs hidden on nearly every disc of every season along with in-depth features - you can find the guides for how to access the Easter eggs online still

The Star Wars original trilogy box set came with a fourth disc with the Empire of Dreams making of documentary on it. It’s maybe less niche than some of the others seeing as it’s on Disney Plus now but still.

The Phantom Menace has an excellent documentary.

If you're into martial arts (Bruce Lee for example), look for the Hong Kong Legends (HKL) releases featuring Bey Logan's full length commentary. He is passionate about the genre, and has anecdotes about almost every scene, actor, etc.

Eli Roth's Cabin Fever had an enjoyable commentary that was basically him sitting having beers and inviting in members of the cast to share stories from behind the scenes, apologising for failing to get 1 particular actress to do a n*** scene and how frightening the Russian dog was. As a fan of American Pie movies I really enjoyed the original trilogy box set, it was loaded with features, Easter eggs and behind the scenes stuff.

One of the best commentaries I've ever heard is Alexander Payne on the Election DVD. You could learn a lot about movie making just from listening to it.

I'll let you know when I come across some. So far, it's all been filler and I can only sight what I consider the worst audio commentary I've heard so far: The one accompanying "Underworld".