Mass Market DVDs Are Dead: Long Live Heritage Physical Media
variety.com
variety.com
The big streaming players just seem to get worse every day - it's probably not an exaggeration that 80% of movies I search for simply aren't available, at all. Especially classics, double especially foreign. You just can't get them. But there's no video stores any more, and I'm not paying $30+ to order a physical disk from another country, wait a week, only to watch it once and put it in a pile to rot.
So I find myself, just like I did in the '90s, downloading and playing them off a computer. And saying the same things to anyone who'll listen - I'd pay to watch this, but no-one will sell it to me for a reasonable price, so I'll just pirate it and enjoy it with a clear conscience.
The PC plebs might have been, but us Mac people had the glorious hotline community..
You can basically find any movie for rent/purchase on Apple TV Store (formerly iTunes Movies) or Vudu or whatever other similar service you want to choose from. They’re just not included with your Netflix/Max/Hulu subscription, which are the modern equivalent to basic cable. They may be on streaming services but only included on a rotating basis.
This “no one will sell it to me for a reasonable price” thing is kind of BS. You’re just not willing to pay at all, or you’re only willing to pay basic cable price for access to a catalog with a size that doesn’t fit that price.
It’s fitting then that the rental and physical media market collapsing now stops entire genres of movies from being made. As an example, people don’t rent comedies anymore, so they don’t get made and put into theaters.
What an odd spin.
People don't rent comedies anymore because there are no comedies made anymore for you to rent.
And nobody's making comedies anymore because present day people are too easily offended by everything and raise hell on Twitter out of every joke.
This is such a tired line. Comedies did not stop getting made because woke mobs were flaming them on Twitter, despite what Joe Rogan might have told you in his latest special plastered all over Netflix.
There is a confluence of actual reasons why comedies aren’t prominent in theaters anymore.
Studios stopped making mid budget movies.
Studios consider international audiences more than ever before and comedy doesn’t transcend cultures easily.
Comedies that performed poorly in theaters often broke even in vhs/dvd sales and rentals. Without that it’s more risky to make them.
Movie goers don’t want to pay $30 for tickets and popcorn to see a comedy.
Low budget comedies are saturated on streaming.
High budget action/comedy movies are being made instead e.g. fall guy.
And there’s certainly additional reasons more relevant than twitter users cancelling movies.
Or foreign investment censorship priorities.
And more: https://pen.org/report/made-in-hollywood-censored-by-beijing...
That doesn't mean it's not true. There's a reason people keep repeating it.
>Studios stopped making mid budget movies.
Have you checked Netflix? It's full of low budget slop.
>Studios consider international audiences more than ever before and comedy doesn’t transcend cultures easily.
I disagree. American and British comedies were incredibly popular with the youth in my Eastern European country. Same with humor from the GTA games and South Park.
>High budget action/comedy movies are being made instead e.g. fall guy.
Is Fall Guy supposed to be a comedy? I've watched it and I don't think I've laughed once. It didn't even make me push air out of my nose.
Yeah, because millionaire comedians who can say whatever they want on their massive platforms didn’t like getting flamed on twitter and the younger generation doesn’t care for their edgy jokes. “You can’t make jokes like that anymore” is just an excuse made by comedians who can’t make a joke audiences want to hear. Studios want to make money, if there was money in it they’d make it, regardless of taste.
> Have you checked Netflix? It's full of low budget slop.
“mid budget movies”
> I disagree. American and British comedies were incredibly popular with the youth in my Eastern European country. Same with humor from the GTA games and South Park.
It’s not universal but it is more difficult to adequately dub a comedy than an action movie. Physical comedy like Mr. Bean doesn’t have that issue but comedies often perform poorly overseas for that reason.
> Is Fall Guy supposed to be a comedy?
Yes, it’s an action/comedy.
I was talking about undubbed.
The number of people willing to speak up to support the right for people to make and enjoy movies, or content in general, that is offensive seems to be growing.
Spotify kept Rogan and dumped the employees complaining about him. Netflix backed Chappelle with his specials. Eminem’s latest album debuted at #1. South Park is still going strong.
The people raising hell on Twitter were never the audience, so it really doesn’t matter what they think. They should be making things for the people who are going to pay.
Disney has been trying to please all those people and there stock has tanked. All I hear are people complaining about their various franchises and how they suck now. I guess those people on Twitter aren’t showing up to support the content they demanded.
There is but not from Hollywood.
>There are comics out there who simply don’t care about getting cancelled
Yeah but Disney and major studios won't touch them.
>The people raising hell on Twitter were never the audience
The doesn't mean Disney and the rest aren't pandering to online social activists. Just look at the new Snow White where they're pushing the girl boss trope who doesn't need a man, doesn't clean the Dwarves' home, and didn't use real live actors for the Dwarves because Peter Dinklage complained about it being offensive to people with dwarfism. Hollywood lives in a bubble.
>Disney has been trying to please all those people and there stock has tanked
And they'll keep doing it as long as they own the world's biggest IPs like Star Wars, Marvel, etc. Once people stop watching their slop altogether they'll stop as well.
But anyway, this is funny to me. Snow White is a nearly 100 year old movie. It came out 22 years after Birth of a Nation. If you think a remake can work as a modern movie with zero changes that is kind of naive in itself isn’t it? It’s not like anyone is going to remake From Russia with Love and include the scenes where James Bond slaps women around.
And I mean, yeah, technically, the original Snow White is probably pretty offensive to people with dwarfism. They’re all heavily dehumanized as lesser people with more flaws than Snow White. Snow White has to come in and fix their life essentially, cook and clean for them, etc.
But anyway, I don’t think that’s the driving reason behind using animated dwarves, I think they couldn’t do some of the comedic elements as well with real actors as they can with exaggerated animation.
There also aren’t a lot of people with dwarfism who are lead-quality actors. You need seven of them for that movie. My guess is that test footage wasn’t working.
The whole business model of comedy movies released to theaters was that they had mediocre theater box office numbers but the theater release would drive a crazy home rental business for years after the movie came out.
That entire business model doesn’t work anymore. After a comedy movie leaves the theater it’s basically worthless and does nothing to drive streaming subscriptions.
Examples like Rogan, South Park, Chappelle, do not apply here.
Rogan’s podcast is not a comedy. And he’s a terrible standup comic.
Chappelle’s comedy specials only require a stage and a microphone to produce. There is no budget besides paying Chappelle.
Eminem is a musician. And, he’s not actually offensive to the general public, especially not anymore.
South Park is a TV show. Trey Parker and Matt Stone haven’t made any movies since the DVD rental era that I talked about. It’s also very inexpensive to produce compared to a comedy movie.
Finally, the elephant in the room. You should really get out of your conservative reality distortion field. This whole idea that Disney’s their wokeness is ruining everything is utter bullshit. My man, they own 20th Century Studios, 20th Century TV, and ABC Studios. They are the majority owner of Hulu. Disney isn’t just “woke politically correct family movies” or whatever conservative weirdos think they are. They are a giant media conglomerate. They finance shows like The Great, full of swearing, violence, and nudity. [1]
Let’s also not forget that Disney is still a box office machine and knows exactly what they are doing.
The top grossing movies in the United States in 2024, 2021, and 2015-2019 were all Disney.
In 2022 Avatar 2 beats out Top Gun Maverick in the worldwide box office.
This idea that Disney has lost its way and doesn’t understand the movie business is baloney. Disney’s stock didn’t tank because of “cancel culture” or “wokeness,” it tanked because half of the company’s revenue is theme parks and Covid-19 wrecked their business. Its movie business is also heavily skewed to in-theater big blockbusters. Seriously, look up the stock, all the downturn happened in 2020-2022. Disney stock is up 5% this year.
Disney struggles with streaming for the same reason the other networks struggle with it: streaming replaced cable but nothing replaced DVD sales and rentals.
[1] I have also noticed that conservative weirdos always bring up South Park, Rogan, Chappelle, and Eminem specifically as great examples of anti-cancel crusaders. The funniest part about that to me is that conservatives are so behind the times that they don’t realize that Eminem isn’t “slim shady” anymore and isn’t offensive to the general public. Somehow Rogan is supposed to be proof that a show that elevates conservative voices can break through an anti-conservative system, when really all he proves is that conservative talk radio is as good a business as it ever was. He is effectively now no different than Rush Limbaugh, except with a format where he has guests on the show. And then there’s South Park which is basically coasting on a fan base just like The Simpsons.
Finally, Chappelle. Let’s be real be real here: a good portion of Chappelle’s white male audience enjoyed the original show because they took his show to be jokes about Black people, at the expense of Black people. Just like the people who didn’t realize that Colbert on The Colbert Report was satire, they didn’t really see any of the satire or social commentary. So it’s not surprising to me that those same mostly conservative white men enjoy watching an hour of trans hate jokes.
I never said I hated anyone. I just think these conservative talking points all rhyme with each other and when you trace them far enough they are all rooted in white supremacist ideas and misogyny.
Turning Red is only “woke” if you think people shouldn’t talk about going on your period because women are bad.
The Little Mermaid remake is only “woke” if you think Black people shouldn’t be the lead in movies.
Lightyear is only “woke” if you think people of the same gender shouldn’t kiss.
The list goes on and on. Literally none of these pro-offensive content people ever explain themselves in any way that makes sense beyond their hate for non-white people, women, and the LGBT community.
You literally criticized Disney for trying to please everyone. If they aren’t trying to please everyone, who are they supposed to sell tickets to, ghosts?
And this conservative cult gets in the way of understanding objective reality, like how you thought that Disney stock went down because of woke movies, when the financial reality of their stock decline had more to do with low Disney+ profitability and the Covid-19 collapse of theme park revenue.
You're also being rude by branding people you don't know as white conservatives and insulting them just because they have a different points of view.
IMHO this is what's wrong with the world. You see an enemy in everyone with a different opinions but you're always the ritcheous one. Pretty sure I saw this before. Antifa does the same. Just because you call yourself anti fascist doesn't make you so.
The current system does not work for consumers, and people pirating media is a result of that. They need to get their shit together, not us.
Meanwhile I'm more than happy to pay for Spotify.
I know how and where to buy the movies. I don't (except for Netflix & Amazon Prime subscriptions) because I'm cheap.
At least I’m being honest.
Some people here are seriously justifying stealing with excuses like “stealing is more convenient and free so it’s the company’s fault”.
Just admit that you don’t want to pay. It’s fine. Everyone knows. No need to come up with elaborate excuses to steal. Everyone can see through them.
If you look closely at film ownership and licensing, you'll know why this is not true.
The production gold standard for content + commentary is Criterion Collection, who now have their own streaming service in addition to their blu-rays for restored films.
Everything else is an unpredictable puzzle palace of variable quality, license availability windows, free-with-ads, digital codes or exclusivity when a studio (e.g. MGM, Paramount) is bought/sold by a streaming service. Vudu has a good service where you can get an HD digital copy for $2 if you own the bluray. Max 100 titles/year. But as usual, the selection of films for "Disc to Digital" is a random output of license quagmires.
Gives opportunity for sorting archives into tiers of importance based on current perspective. Content with highest ratio of importance/size can be stored on enterprise-grade SSD.
The best motivation for keeping healthy archives is to use them :) It's worth finding offline OSS/paid software to help categorize/search/browse archives. Upcoming offline LLMs should also help.
Tailscale on Apple TV (and other devices) can be an exit node for remote streaming access to archives on home networks.
Like having your own Netflix service.... I found I watched a lot more of my movies that way... than when they were just sitting on my drive.
E.g. Existenz and Strange Days
Side note, I first watched Strange Days on a VR headset (the Gear VR) while on a 6hr flight, having no idea the movie would be about virtual reality. That felt pretty damn special.
Luckily there are plenty of DVDs floating about for those films, but you can imagine a situation where a cult classic released now will not have that physical artifact.
It's surprising that something like that hasn't been legislated for film and possibly for TV.
It would be quite doable today technologically.
Instead, we got link rot, abandonware IP, and lots of memes.
Stuff definitely falls through the cracks.
Even the 20-something-year-old promise of Google to "index the world's information" has failed pathetically. I frequently can't find things I'm looking for, because all I have left in my head is a fingerprint of "I'll know it when I see it" and maybe a couple odd keywords that aren't enough to pull any signal out of the noise.
In one case I got ChatGPT to help me find a book I'd been missing for years because the generic keywords like "magic staff", "tree", "volcano crater" returned jack shit on common search engines. (It was "The Ancient One" by T. A. Barron, if anyone else is stuck looking for it too)
In another case I found a book on Kagi.
The Library of Babel is a much closer analogy. Everything _might_ be in there, but you probably aren't gonna find anything worthwhile. lol.
I remember seeing an ad for whose premise was a cheap hotel where "we have every movie ever made on our TVs".
That was one promise of the streaming future... but there was never an understanding that the internet was permanent.
Even during the initial fad of "everyone needs their own homepage" before geocities, most pages were dead or broken or obsolete in a few months.
A large distributed redundant archive of data would be useful... probably with some mechanism where you can donate resources to preserve the data you like without having to support the stuff you don't care about (because resources are finite.)
If given enough warning about my own death I might be tempted to pay for a couple seedboxes on bulletproof servers and just hope the files stay up as long as possible and find many new homes before the money runs out. The RIAA/MPA can't come after you once you're dead.
This is kind of the problem with data hoarding: it’s more about the act of preservation than the content being preserved. The whole practice is based off of anxiety and fear of loss rather than any productive purpose. There’s often low to zero demand for a huge amount of the content.
Just like my grandma’s record collection or fine China, it all amounts to a bunch of stuff that meant something to someone else but not to me. It was offered to me in a vain hope that I might enjoy it in the same way, despite the great improbability of that being the case.
That’s why those items are siting in a landfill somewhere.
I would guess, for example, that most people read very few books that were written before the 1800s. They would be difficult to read, their subject matter would be foreign, and without extensive rewriting/translation/adaptation, they wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense.
Most certainly there are many classic works that survive much longer than a few hundred years, but the percentage is a tiny sliver of all the stories people have created. And that’s ultimately perfectly okay. That’s just how things work. Nobody has enough time on earth to consume such a massive amount of content that humans have made, and a lot of it is straight up bad, or just repetitive of other similar content.
Lastly, there is also another possibility entirely: that the original creators don’t want future generations to see their work.
I think it’s important to remember that all rights are reserved to the creator of the work. As an artist I can sell a print of a painting for a year and decide that it will never be sold again after that. It’s my right to stop selling new copies and my right to prevent people from redistributing copies until the work reaches public domain, because it’s my work.
I know in the case of corporate filmmaking the lack of available works is more about apathy to specific old pieces of content basically being worthless to them, but it’s still a little point to keep in mind.
Even libraries throw away books that nobody lends for a certain amount of time. They have limited shelf space so they need to curate the collection periodically.
Same with digital collections. Yes, it's easier to extend the space available, but it's still just hoarding unless you curate.
Case in point: You can easily get every single Gameboy game for every Gameboy variant.
BUT.
You'll get _every single Gameboy game for every Gameboy variant_. That's thousands of games, in multiple languages and minor version variants. You'll also get rom hacked versions with different cheats enabled for the games. It's an immense pile of crap you (or someone) need to curate by hand to make it an actual collection of games. Going through your memories and multiple reviews checking which games are actually worth conserving and which were just shovelware is a ton of work.
Archiving some lists of "best games" and "hidden gems" alongside it would be worthwhile indeed.
Movies like the matrix have already had an eternal effect on the Zeitgeist of a generation, forever altering human culture in some small way, at the very least. Why worry about it still being on a drive somewhere in 200 years?
Movies like The Matrix don't materialize out of thin air.
They are the cultural and creative descendants of countless prior art pieces.
There's a reason why film creators publish commentary about their production process.
To neglect history is to starve the future.
Yes, but applied in a sliding window with considerable drop out. The world decides every day which art is worth keeping around and which can be allowed to be forgotten. Just because a film is important to the common psyche in 2001 doesn't mean that will be the case in 3001.
By that logic we should stop creating music or writing books right now. What's the point? There are already enough of both that no one could ever have enough years of life to read/hear it all.
Obviously there are a lot of very good reason to keep creating new things, and a lot of good reasons to preserve the old ones, not the least of which is that old works create the inspiration and material for new ones. A good song or a good story is timeless and can be enjoyed no matter many years have passed since it was created.
Media says a lot of about our culture and history. It shows how art has evolved and can provide a lot of education and wisdom that can get lost when fads and trends steal the spotlight for a long time, but when older works are still around to be studied and enjoyed they can be rediscovered.
Your presuming that old media and mew media is of equal importance/relevance, which I disagree with.
There's billions of people and they all like different things.
There are a bunch of movies for every decade that are still "must see" just for the impact they had on media.
I don't believe this is actually the case.
You don't need to see the full movie or read the whole book, but you need to know it exists and how it changed the world.
This is the approach I've taken. Shelves of records, DVDs, tapes, CDs... all gathering dust and taking up space. Honestly the only music I listen to is a classic rock radio station when I'm driving my car. Whatever they play is what I listen to. It's just not that important to me any more. Movies, music, they are just time-fillers. They are something to do when there's nothing to do. When I was 20 I felt differently.
My collection of DVDs and CDs is still flawless after many decades. I have some VHS approaching 40-50 years (Although it’s slowly degrading).
Meanwhile, "object" editions are highly suspect from a collecting point of view since generated by a marketing machine. And the documents are often very hard to get to because ignored by the online platforms. The opinions reported are interesting but what a mess for now.
Other activities are pointless, might work for a little time, for a small set of information but not on scale. To preserve heritage we simply should keep data fresh.
When Netflix wrecked their dvd business, that was a sure sign as well.
https://www.discogs.com/release/848169-Carbon-Based-Lifeform...