Cinema has a physical media problem
Do you remember the first physical copy of a movie you bought? For me, it was a DVD of Calendar Girls, a film about a group of middle-aged women in Lancashire to which I, as a ten-year-old in Texas, was inexplicably drawn. I watched it over and over. It got scratched because I had zero sense of responsibility, and there was a scene that took place in some kind of shed which always skipped.
When I was even younger, my brother and I would watch Shrek on a VHS tape. Sometimes, we’d do our future selves a solid by rewinding the tape when we finished watching it, feeling extremely smug for being so forward-thinking. My parents still have that tape in a cupboard somewhere, and there’s no way I’m letting go of it.
There is something very personal about a DVD collection, in the same way that there is something personal about a vinyl collection or book collection. It isn’t just about showing off to your house guests how obscure your knowledge or refined your pop cultural tastes are, and it isn’t just about materialism, either. There is something fundamental about holding something physical in your hands. There is a permanence about it that you don’t get with a digital copy. You know that you can always go back to it, read the cover, watch the director’s commentary if you’re really serious about it, and reinforce the personal connection you have with it.
When streaming services began to emerge in the 2010s, it seemed like a new golden age for cinephiles. You no longer had to spend $15.99 on a DVD you weren’t sure you were going to like or drive to the video store or the library to rent it. You didn’t even have to order a copy through Netflix’s DVD-by-mail service and wait several days for it to arrive. Just a few clicks and a few dollars, and it was on your screen.
Now that almost everything is on streaming, though, clear problems have started to emerge. For one thing, rights issues mean that movies bounce around from platform to platform, sometimes disappearing from services altogether, even if you’ve supposedly purchased them. In reality, you never actually ‘own’ a film on a digital platform. All you’re doing is licensing it from the streamer, and the streamer can revoke that license any time it wants.
Sometimes, platforms even remove their own content despite owning the rights. Disney pulled dozens of its own movies and series from Disney+ in 2023, while HBO came under fire earlier this year for pulling every episode of the seminal cartoon series Looney Tunes from its platform in a reported attempt to move toward adult content. If you don’t have physical copies of Looney Tunes, you’ll be forced to watch low-quality, truncated clips on YouTube.
Another issue is that some films are stuck in rights limbo indefinitely and can’t be found on any streaming platform. Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca, Ron Howard’s Cocoon, and David Lynch’s Wild at Heart are just some of the high-profile movies that can’t be streamed in the US right now. A few weeks ago, I was trying to find the classic screwball comedy The Thin Man in the UK, but I discovered that there was nowhere to stream it. You can’t even find it on YouTube.
These problems don’t even come close to the biggest issue of them all, though. For the most part, the movies that you can’t stream can be purchased in DVD or Blu-ray form if you look hard enough. But if it’s an original release from a streaming service, you may discover that there is no amount of money you can pay to get a physical copy.
Last year, Mike Flanagan, the filmmaker behind horror movies like Hush, Gerald’s Game, and Doctor Sleep, as well as series like The Haunting of Hill House and Midnight Mass, revealed that Netflix actively avoids physical releases of their original properties.
“In the years I worked at Netflix, I tried very hard to get them to release my work on Blu-ray and DVD,” he said during a panel discussion. “They refused at every turn. It became clear very fast that their only priority was subs, and that they were actively hostile to the idea of physical media.” It’s up to companies like Criterion to break these movies out of streaming jail and given them a physical release. This is the only reason you can purchase hard copies of Roma, Marriage Story, and All of Us Strangers.
The problem goes far beyond a cinephile’s desire to own physical media, too. Film preservation relies on hard copies, be it film, tapes, or DVDs. Digital media is ephemeral. Licences can be revoked, files can be corrupted, and quality can be watered down for the sake of easy storage. Physical media, whether it’s sitting on your shelf at home or in the US Library of Congress, isn’t subject to the whims of an executive who has never heard of Akira Kurosawa or seen a low-budget cult film from the Czech New Wave.
Flanagan highlighted this point, saying that “while companies like Netflix pride themselves on being disruptors and have proven that they can affect great change in the industry, they sometimes fail to see the difference between disruption and damage. So much that they can find themselves, intentionally or not, doing enormous harm to the very concept of film preservation.”
The irony is that, while the idea of ‘owning’ physical media can look like a manifestation of a consumerist, materialistic society, it’s the digital realm that we have to worry about in that regard. Digital media is beholden to studios and corporations that are only concerned with the bottom line rather than the preservation of culture. In contrast, distributors like Criterion, Kino Lorber, Arrow Video, and Severin Films offer high-quality, physical restorations of movies that often include audio commentary, essays, multiple cuts, and elaborate artwork. In short, physical media treats films as enduring works of art, while streaming platforms reduce them to ‘content.’ I know which definition I want to be behind.
