What was the last film to be released on VHS?
Ah, the VHS, yes, the sheer glory days of sticking in a tape and watching the images flicker onto the CRT screens of yore. All sadly gone now, of course. But there was a time when the video format was all the rage, and not a bookcase in the country wasn’t stacked with several of those beautifully thick cases.
The Video Home System standard was invented in 1976 by the Victor Company of Japan. It was made in response to the wildly expensive videotape technology of the 1950s, and the new cheaper cost of VHS meant that several households could afford to purchase a player and several tapes.
There was a highly-publicised battle for the big home video competitor in the late 1970s and early 1980s between VHS and Sony’s Betamax. The two formats were incompatible with one another’s players. By the mid-1980s, it was clear that VHS had come out on top, at least until the invention of the accursed DVD.
The highest-selling VHS release of all time is unequivocally the universally-beloved Disney classic The Lion King, which was released on the format in March 1995, nearly a year after its theatrical release. It sold a whopping 32million copies by 1997, including 4.5m on the very first day. It also featured a preview of Disney’s next animated film Pocahontas.
But, of course, the glory days of the VHS were always going to be numbered when the cheaper-to-produce DVD came along, which also boasted far bigger storage capacity. The final VHS was released in 2006 with David Cronenberg’s 2005 action thriller A History of Violence.
The film is an adaptation of John Wagner and Vince Locke’s graphic novel of the same name, starring Viggo Mortensen, Maria Bello, William Hurt and Ed Harris. Mortensen plays a local diner owner whose shady past comes back to haunt him when he stops an attempted robbery in his small Indiana town.
In terms of the different genre’s final release on VHS, when it comes to comedy, it was also in 2006 that Just Friends, starring Ryan Reynolds, Amy Smart and Chris Klein, was released. It focuses on a high schooler with an unrequited crush on his friend who turns the tables on her when he becomes more successful in his adult life.
The last horror film on VHS was Saw II, which had a crazy amount of hype surrounding its release both in cinemas and as home media. Meanwhile, the 2005 film adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel Pride & Prejudice is considered to be the last romance film to come out on VHS and Barbie: Mermadia was the time something for the kids was put out on the format.
