The final 10 movies to be released on VHS
The next technological innovation is always lurking just around the corner, so it was inevitable that VHS would eventually peter out of the public consciousness despite spending decades as the most popular home video format.
Handily defeating Betamax in the battle for supremacy that raged in the late 1970s and early 1980s, VHS even fended off the digital threat of Laserdisc before eventually succumbing to the unstoppable rise of DVD and, latterly, Blu-ray, with physical media itself currently engaged in a heated conflict against the instant gratification of streaming and digital-only releases.
VHS did manage to hold on until the mid-2000s, though, when David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence became the last-ever feature to secure a wide release on cassette. It’s a unique distinction for the violent graphic novel adaptation, and the remainder of the medium’s final titles are about as eclectic as possible.
Starring some of the biggest names in the industry, VHS bowed out with blockbusters, horror sequels, misfires from notable directors, and prestige dramas, ensuring that variety remained the spice of life right up until its final figurative breaths. Pristine copies of certain films are now of great value to collectors, but it would also be safe to suggest the buyers’ market for Dwayne Johnson’s risible video game actioner Doom or Scooby-Doo director Raja Gosnell’s panned family comedy Yours, Mine & Hours isn’t thriving.
Joe Wright’s four-time Academy Award-nominated literary epic Pride & Prejudice hardly sits side-by-side with the likes of gruesome horror sequel Saw II and substandard swashbuckling follow-up The Legend of Zorro under any storytelling or genre parameters, either, but they all served as a trio of the last ten VHS tapes to be made available for mass public consumption.
Curiously, Keira Knightley features twice, but unlike the aforementioned Pride & Prejudice, Tony Scott’s semi-biographical crime thriller Domino was a critical dud and a commercial catastrophe. Sam Mendes’ Jarhead didn’t fare anywhere near as well in either circle as his first two films, American Beauty and Road to Perdition, but then again, neither of them can lay claim to being amongst the dying breaths of VHS.
Ryan Reynolds’ raucous comedy Just Friends and Harold Ramis’ penultimate directorial effort The Ice Harvest – a rare foray into hard-boiled noir territory for the comedy veteran – round out an eclectic assortment of legacy movies that have virtually nothing in common in any respect but nonetheless conspired to inadvertently secure a place in history as the final ten titles to be pressed and shipped on VHS.
The final movies released on VHS:
- A History of Violence (David Cronenberg, 2005)
- Saw II (Darren Lynn Bousman, 2005)
- Just Friends (Roger Kumble, 2005)
- Jarhead (Sam Mendes, 2005)
- The Ice Harvest (Harold Ramis, 2005)
- Yours, Mine & Ours (Raja Gosnell, 2005)
- Pride & Prejudice (Joe Wright, 2005)
- Domino (Tony Scott, 2005)
- Doom (Andrzej Bartkowiak, 2005)
- The Legend of Zorro (Martin Campbell, 2005)
