What movie was Netflix’s most popular DVD?
In March 1998, Tim Burton likely hadn’t realised just how much he’d sparked the beginnings of a new era. Beetlejuice, Burton’s 1988 gothic classic, became the first-ever Netflix DVD to be shipped.
For those who grew up in the early 2000s, you’ll remember just how much a staple of family movie nights those Netflix DVDs were. You might remember coming home from school to see one of those coveted red envelopes sitting on the welcome mat, a whole world of discovery waiting inside and the perfect bookend to another long week.
Back then, Netflix sort of emerged from nowhere. What we also didn’t realise was that we were in a massively transformative period of time, sitting at the threshold of the decline of physical formats and into a new age of another beast entirely: streaming. DVDs started declining in sales around 2007 and 2008, but even that was fairly slow, with it remaining the dominant format for quite a while after sales began to droop.
Still, for Netflix, it would prove to be a blessing in disguise, the push that urged them to eventually re-model while sticking to the heart of what mattered: accessible media. When Netflix launched its streaming service in 2007, it was initially only available to US audiences. There also wasn’t much incentive to actually sign up, with only around a thousand titles available. At the time when it was free with DVD subscriptions, the company had also delivered its billionth DVD.
What was Netflix’s most popular DVD?
Predicting Netflix’s future at that time was probably a tough call for even the more schooled tech buffs. As DVDs continued to wane, Netflix kept celebrating successes, and in 2016, the paid-for streaming service, as we now know it, was operating in 50 countries. DVD was well and truly on its way out by then, but Netflix wasn’t parting ways with its origins any time soon.
In fact, it maintained its DVD mailing service until 2023, marking a long, 25-year service with celebrations of its own – including a reflection on all its biggest milestones over the years. One of which was the first-ever shipped DVD, a copy of Burton’s 1988 classic, to a door that had no idea it was making history. Another was the fact that, over the years, it shipped out a staggering 5.2 billion disks in red envelopes across over 500 subgenres, which is so impressive that it almost seems made up.
When it comes to the most-shipped DVD, it’s easy to hazard a few good guesses. Given that one of their best years for rentals was 2010, it could have been any of the major blockbusters of that year – Inception, The Social Network, Black Swan, and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, to name a few. But the most popular title was actually from the previous year: John Lee Hancock’s sports classic The Blind Side.
While some may see this as an anticlimactic revelation, it’s hard not to see it for what it actually is – a symbol of Netflix’s meteoric rise during one of the most rocky eras of physical media. Things began to change around 2007, but Netflix continued to soar, with The Blind Side sitting smack bang in the middle of a digital revolution that nobody even saw coming.
