The film fans who refuse to surrender to streaming: ‘One day you’ll barter bread for our DVDs’

When a hurricane struck Florida in 2018, Christina’s neighborhood lost electricity, cell service and internet. For four weeks her family was cut off from the world, their days dictated by the rising and setting sun. But Christina did have a vast collection of movies on DVD and Blu-ray, and a portable player that could be charged from an emergency generator.

Word got around. The family’s library of physical films and books became a kind of currency. Neighbors offered bottled water or jars of peanut butter for access. The 1989 Tom Hanks comedy The ’Burbs was an inexplicably valuable commodity, as were movies that could captivate restless and anxious children.

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“I don’t think 99% of people in America would ever stop to think, ‘What would I do if I woke up tomorrow and all access to digital media disappeared?’ But we know,” Christina told me. “We’ve lived it. We’ll never give up our collection. Ever. And maybe, one day, you’ll be the one to come and barter a loaf of bread for our DVD of Casino.”

Streaming was supposed to kill physical media, and has come very close. The DVD and Blu-ray market fell from $4.7bn in revenue in 2017 to barely $1.5bn in 2022. In September, Netflix ended its movie-by-mail service. Best Buy has removed physical media from its brick-and-mortar stores, and Target and Walmart may follow. Some new films may never be released physically at all.

Yet a counterrevolution has been gathering. Some film fans never gave up physical media: they’ve spent years quietly buying thrift-store discs, discarded by the many US households that no longer have DVD or Blu-ray players, and waiting for their chance to rise again. Other fans, frustrated by streaming’s limitations, have recently rediscovered physical media and trickled to join its rear-guard army.

Physical media will never regain its heights, but it may live to fight a little longer – supported by loyalists and by a cottage industry of independent and boutique film distributors that license classic and cult films and sell high-quality physical editions to eager, sometimes frantic, fans. Some of these labels offer streaming channels or video-on-demand as well, but still find business in Blu-rays. “We’ve grown rather than shrunk,” Umbrella Entertainment, a distributor in Australia, told me.

And when Universal released Oppenheimer on 4K Blu-ray this fall, the initial run sold out, with feverish Christopher Nolan fans pillaging the same megastores that are moving to drop physical media. 4K Blu-rays are currently the smallest slice of the film disc market, and require ultra-high-definition players and TVs, meaning that the Oppenheimer run was driven by a niche within a niche. But the episode seemed to indicate that a market exists – especially when it has champions.

Nolan himself had encouraged fans to rally to physical media: “If you buy a 4K UHD, you buy a Blu-ray, it’s on your shelf, it’s yours,” he told IGN last year. “[Y]ou own it. That’s never really the case with any form of digital distribution.” Oppenheimer’s producers also resisted the recent trend of giving films perfunctory theatrical releases, or none, then rushing them online.

My Damascene moment came last year, after one too many times I couldn’t find films I wanted on my streaming services. I started borrowing DVDs from the public library, and buying my favorites on Blu-ray. I wondered if other people had come full circle. On a recent evening, I posted on some online forums for movie buffs, asking if anyone still bought physical media and wanted to talk.

I got 180 emails. People cited all sorts of reasons for refusing to give up physical media: desire to protect old or obscure films; nostalgia; fear that streaming services will retroactively censor films; physical media’s dramatically better audiovisual fidelity; fondness for behind-the-scenes featurettes and other bonus content included on discs; distaste for the numbing nightly ritual of scrolling streaming menus.

Several people said that owning physical films made family movie nights feel more intentional, or that they prize their old movies because Hollywood’s recent output disappoints them. “Last week my older son chose Cast Away,” Ken, in Seattle, told me. “It was such a memorable family film, and drew us in more than any flick highlighted on the AppleTV home screen.” Others said they live in rural areas where slow internet makes streaming unreliable.

Every person said they worry about losing access to films – a not irrational fear. Cillian Murphy just won the Oscar for best actor for Oppenheimer, but the movie that made him a star, 2002’s critically lauded and commercially successful 28 Days Later, is virtually impossible to stream. It’s also out of print on disc, with used copies fetching $60 or $70 on eBay.

It’s partly for this reason that the actor Timothy Simons, best known as Jonah on Veep, prefers physical films. There’s a notion that, “you know, ‘Everything’s available on streaming,’” he told me. “Well, it kind of isn’t. And the thing that is available on streaming could just not be tomorrow, if two companies you don’t care about get in a fight about licensing.”

Some enthusiasts are intense, even maniacal, collectors. On the Tonight Show, the actor Carrie Coon recently said that she and her husband, the playwright and actor Tracy Letts, have 10,000 Blu-rays: “My husband’s a very sick man,” she joked, who meticulously researches films on a website called DVDBeaver. “I thought he was looking at porn.” Other people are more casual and recent converts, like the recovering “minimalist” vlogger who recently issued a sheepish mea culpa on YouTube: “I regret decluttering my DVDs.”

Physical media fans of all types tend to see themselves as survivalists prepping for apocalypse – “When the streaming sites took off,” someone told me, “people thought I was crazy for still collecting, but now I feel like my time has finally come” – or like the Irish monks and Arab scholars who, during the Dark Ages, are said to have protected the knowledge of antiquity while Europe burned books as firewood.

Streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu, and Apple TV+ were going to make physical media – and cable – pointless. We would be able to access our favorite films at any time, according to the theory, by finding them on our subscription services, renting them by video-on-demand, or buying digital copies that would be stored for us forever in a mysterious cloud.

It was all so glorious: we would have fewer boxes to carry when we moved. Our Ikea bookcases, freed of the agonizing weight of literature and film, could instead carry the random decorative art pieces for which they yearned. Instead of movies, we would watch prestige miniseries, which are like films, but padded out to eight hours by unnecessary subplots and trauma-related backstories.

Blu-rays – which look like DVDs, but are high-definition and store more data – had the misfortune to arrive in 2006, a year before Netflix unveiled its streaming service. By as early as 2012, more Americans were paying to watch movies online than on physical media; DVD and Blu-ray sales have declined since. But holdouts remain.

“I’m bummed. I go to Target now and I see their selection has gotten smaller and prices higher,” Amanda Bowman, in Michigan, told me. “I just feel like [companies] are trying to herd people into streaming. It’s frustrating. It’s also isolating.” She once worked at a video store and misses its sense of community.

Physical video rental stores have almost vanished, though you can still rent from one of thousands of Redbox vending machines left in the US, the non-profits Scarecrow Video in Seattle and Movie Madness in Portland, and a lone Blockbuster that stands vigil in Bend, Oregon. People “have come from all over the world to rent movies”, the Blockbuster’s manager wrote in the Guardian in 2019. “[W]e’ve set up close to 5,000 new memberships. Maybe 20% of those were one-time users who just wanted the Blockbuster card, but the rest are regulars to varying degrees.”

Derek Loman, in Missouri, told me he was so nostalgic for the old days that he turned his home office into a replica 90s video store, complete with a candy aisle and a door in the back marked ADULT. Ken, in Seattle, used to look forward to stopping by retail chains to browse new DVD and Blu-ray offerings; now, “I’ve kind of lost all my interest in visiting Best Buy at all,” he said. Physical media was “kind of like their Costco hotdog”.

Streaming isn’t wholly bad – it’s convenient, still cheaper than cable, and can give people outside metropolitan areas easier access to new series and films, including international pictures, like 2019’s Parasite, that might have been slower to circulate in the Blockbuster days. Amy Jo Smith, the president of the Digital Entertainment Group, a home video trade association, thinks consumers like having different format options.

“Sometimes you want steak, sometimes hamburger, sometimes just feed me whatever,” she told me. “And I think what you’re seeing now is that consumers realize that they’re in the driver’s seat.” She added that she can’t predict the future of physical media. “I think it’s continuing to decline except you don’t see it actually going away, for the reasons you might call out.”

Yet physical media’s decline has had side-effects – including, according to Matt Damon, worse films.

“The DVD was a huge part of our business,” the actor explained in 2021. You could “afford to not make all of your money when [a film] played in the theater, because you knew you’d have the DVD coming behind the release, and six months later you get, you know, a whole ’nother chunk.” When “that went away, that changed the type of movies that we could make”. Financing more adventurous or offbeat films became “a massive gamble in a way that it wasn’t in the 1990s when they were making … the kind of movies that I loved”.

And, contrary to streaming’s promise, you can’t actually watch whatever, whenever. Constricted by licensing and pressure to promote their own content, streamers seem to have ever weaker and more unpredictable libraries. Consumers who thought they would only have to pay for one or two subscriptions ended up with three, or four or five.

Film fans have also been unsettled to discover that the digital versions of films or series they love are not always what they remember. Disney removed a racial slur from 1971’s The French Connection in a way that sanitized its ugly protagonist, “Popeye” Doyle. Other times, iconic needle-drop moments now have different music, for rights reasons.

The other irony is that consumers who ditched physical media as old-fashioned effectively downgraded, technologically. Movies on disc don’t get pixelated or need to buffer. Ryan Verrill, who runs a news resource called Disc-Connected, worries that people are so used to streaming that they don’t realize they’re being ripped off. Streamers “say, ‘Hey, you can stream 4K,’ but it’s not 4K,” he told me. “It’s compressed beyond belief and encoded way worse than even a [regular, non-4K] Blu-ray is. Consumers pay more for a ‘4K plan’ that isn’t 4K. It’s ridiculous.”

The notion of “owning” films digitally has also soured. In 2018, longtime iTunes customers who thought they’d purchased films forever were shocked to notice that Apple sometimes deletes titles from users’ libraries for licensing reasons. Last month customers of Funimation, an anime streaming service that was acquired by Crunchyroll, learned that titles they’d bought from Funimation would be deleted.

Film discs probably aren’t permanent, either, though if stored properly they are estimated to work for at least two decades and often far longer.

“It became clear to me, roughly at the time of Netflix’s transition from sending hard-copy discs to your home to the streaming era, that there was value in retaining your own physical media,” the writer and podcaster Sean Fennessey, of The Ringer, told me. “Sometimes they just didn’t have discs I wanted. But when they moved to a streaming platform, they didn’t have anything. They had one-100th, one-1,000th, of what I was looking for.”

Fennessey was talking by video-call from his converted garage; behind him were shelves containing “north of 3,000” titles. He increasingly uses his platform on The Big Picture and The Rewatchables, two film podcasts with avid followings, to evangelize for physical media – a stance that even his co-hosts find “baffling”, he said.

On a recent podcast, however, he recalled people approaching him after a live event he had hosted: “Almost all of them wanted to tell me about their most recent physical media purchases. There were questions about organization. They wanted to know [the] best labels. Something is happening. Something is growing.”

Jesse Nelson noticed things change during the pandemic. The modest online store that he and his wife ran from their home near Philadelphia, DiabolikDVD (“Demented discs from the world over”), began doing such brisk business that he moved the operation to a warehouse and hired four employees. These days he gets several hundred orders a week. The shop mainly caters to fans of horror and cult films, but customers have also started requesting more mainstream titles, like the recent sports family drama The Iron Claw.

People kept in by Covid signed up for Netflix and other streamers at unprecedented rates. Yet some – perhaps nostalgists keen to dig up childhood favorites, or cinephiles with time on their hands and itchy fingers – also found their way to physical media distributors. Arrow Video, a popular boutique distributor, saw a growth of 72% in its US business from 2020 to 2021, according to Variety.

Arrow, Criterion, Kino Lorber and BFI are probably the best known distributors, but in recent years a number of others have thrived, including Shout! Factory, Vinegar Syndrome and Severin in the US; Eureka, Indicator, Radiance and Second Sight in the UK; and Umbrella and Imprint in Australia. Some labels inspire cults of their own, with disciples arguing over which has the best remasters, special features or packaging. To help cover costs up front, many boutiques focus on limited editions; calls for preorders can inspire feeding frenzies.

Boutiques tend to begin as shoestring operations serving small but highly motivated audiences, Nelson told me. “A studio says, ‘We sold 10,000 copies of this, that’s terrible.’ But Vinegar Syndrome says, ‘We sold 10,000 copies, amazing.’”

“What we picked up on a couple of years ago,” James Keogh at Umbrella told me, “is that a lot of people now look towards distributors as tastemakers, or curators, of film. There’s a whole bunch of film movements and people want to track those movements and understand more about those directors and groups.”

As with vinyl records – which are enjoying an extraordinary renaissance – the appeal is also partly aesthetic. Streaming can’t replicate the “pleasure of holding the physical representation of a cinematic experience in your hand”, Bret Wood at Kino Lorber believes. Boutique releases in particular often have beautiful packaging. Online, collectors brag of recent hauls and post “shelfies”. Discs’ special features are a wealth of information, as well; fans as well as many film-makers have described discs’ behind-the-scenes featurettes as a free film school.

Fans have been excited by the growth of 4K Blu-rays, which offer what may be the final format of home theater. “The quality blew me away,” one fan told me. The discs’ greater expense (for both producers and consumers) and technical requirements, however, have limited their market. Some newer video game consoles, such as the PS5 and Xbox Series X, play 4K film discs, which could conceivably help popularize them, but at the same time an increasing number of gamers are choosing consoles that don’t have disc drives at all.

Collecting physical films can become an expensive hobby quickly, though Timothy Simons urged me to remind newcomers that it doesn’t have to be: “I swear to God, most of my collection I got at one pawnshop in Atlanta that was selling Blu-rays for $2 a piece. And if you are going to buy something new, look for boutique places and homegrown stores. Support indie labels.”

There can also be an information curve, with novices navigating a dizzying number of labels and an online community given to arcane debates about the merits of particular remasters. A classic rookie error is importing a Blu-ray from abroad, then discovering it won’t play; discs are often region-locked for rights reasons, though the motivated soon find workarounds.

Fennessey doubts physical media will ever again be the household staple it was in its DVD heyday, but he hopes more movie fans will rediscover – or just discover – its virtues.

Physical media “is a ‘you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone’ proposition”, he said. “If you care about movies, and movie history, and you want to be able to see the things that you love over time, it’s the best way to ensure that, if you can afford it. That’s my pitch.”