Last month, a young man walked into Night Owl, a store in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn that sells Blu-rays, DVDs and even a few video cassettes of movies and television shows, and browsed for several minutes. Eventually he plucked a case from a shelf: A handsome Criterion Collection release of “The Royal Tenenbaums,” the first Wes Anderson movie he had ever seen.
“I had a ton of DVDs growing up,” Noah Snyder, 27, said. But reading about the way contemporary conglomerates treat films and television programs on their streaming services had prodded him to acquire physical media again. Snyder cited the actress Cristin Milioti’s recent comments about “Made for Love,” her show that was not only canceled, but removed altogether from the HBO Max streaming platform.
“The stuff the CEOs do, they’re bad decisions,” Snyder said. “I don’t want something I love to be taken away like that.”
In the last decade or two, the story of physical copies of movies and television has been overwhelmingly one of decline. Blockbuster is essentially gone, streaming is ascendant, Netflix no longer sends DVDs through the mail, and Best Buy no longer stocks them in its stores. Many manufacturers have ceased making disc players. Retail sales of new physical products in home entertainment fell below $1 billion last year, according to the Digital Entertainment Group, an industry association.
Yet amid the streaming deluge, there are signs — small, tenuous and anecdotal, but real — of a rebellion. Alex Holtz, a media and entertainment analyst at International Data Corporation, compared Blu-rays to vinyl albums. Holtz, an audiophile, gladly streams new music while on walks, but he buys records he loves. “We’re in a back-to-the-future moment,” he said.
Similarly, some movie fans are deciding to reinvest in the old-fashioned notion of owning copies of movies and shows. They often look and sound superior to streaming and, at least as importantly, they can be held in your hands and, absent burglary or a covetous brother-in-law, they cannot be taken away.
“THINK: of your favorite film,” the producers of the 2022 indie comedy “Hundreds of Beavers” wrote in a viral manifesto last year, as they prepared to drop their physical release. “Now think again: where’s your personal copy? You probably ‘stream’ your movies — from some faceless, centralized data server. But WHO owns that server? WHO decides what stays and what goes?”
The manifesto concluded, “This isn’t just about nostalgia — it’s about survival: Blu-rays are freedom in the face of digital control.”
Increasing numbers of film fans agree.
“People are getting wise to this idea that you don’t really own the digital things you supposedly own, and the only way you truly own something is to own it physically,” said Aaron Hamel, who, with his business partner, Jess Mills, opened Night Owl earlier this year..
There are hobbyists and collectors constantly building new shelf space and scanning notices of releases from obscure imprints.
Johnathan Lyman, a software developer in Washington State, supplements his many streaming subscriptions with physical media. He subscribes to HBO Max, but he also has all of the seasons of “Westworld,” which streams there, on 4K Ultra HD — because, he said, it looks “way better.”
But perhaps more notable are the casual, less technically savvy, and younger cineastes who wish to own physical copies of their first Wes Anderson film, or the complete run of “Twin Peaks,” or the movies that were their favorites when they were 11.
“With streaming and with how things are being changed and banned and challenged, it feels important to keep movies I love,” said Avery Coffey, 25, the host of “Unbound & Rewound,” a podcast about horror books and movies, who was also browsing Night Owl last month. Coffey bought a DVD of “High School Musical” recently, she said, “to show the children in my family things that are important to me.”
Buying a physical copy of your favorite movie is not a purely sentimental decision. When you stream, say, “Casablanca,” you are in effect renting it — it is available only so long as a streamer chooses to make it available and you choose to subscribe to the service (or, in the cases of free streamers, view advertisements). And when you buy “Casablanca” digitally, typically through Amazon, Apple or YouTube, you almost always are actually licensing it — and licenses can be revoked. Users of the anime service Funimation learned this the hard way last year, when the streamer was acquired and some earlier digital licenses were no longer honored. And Amazon users allege in a pending class-action lawsuit that they misunderstood the nature of digital ownership, leading them to pay higher prices than they might have otherwise.
Digital versions can also be altered by their owners. George Lucas added numerous computer-generated scenery and fauna to “Star Wars,” and even reversed a shootout between Han Solo and the bounty hunter Greedo; the version streaming on Disney+ is not the original. Streamers have removed nudity and cigarettes from films. Episodes of “30 Rock” that used blackface were taken out of circulation at the creator Tina Fey’s request. Netflix deleted a graphic scene from the first season of “13 Reasons Why” two years after it released the show.
“When consumers purchase media, they believe they have a series of rights, including that of permanent possession: the ability to loan it, to give it away, to resell it,” said Aaron Perzanowski, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School.
He added, “We still see consumers being frustrated, outraged,” when they realize they do not have that right after they have bought something digitally.
The streamers are fickle. Movies cycle on and off services (many outlets, including The New York Times, publish lists of movies on each one that are updated every month). And while physical media is often not cheap, the streamers’ prices are also daunting: This year, the combined cost of ad-free subscriptions to, for instance, Netflix, HBO Max, Hulu and Criterion Channel summed to more than $700.
“I continue to be an advocate for streaming, but it doesn’t strike me as an either-or proposition,” said Jonathan Marlow, the executive director of Scarecrow Video, a nonprofit archive in Seattle. (Others include Kim’s Video in New York and Vidiots in Los Angeles.)
The streamers do not possess infinite films, Marlow noted. Netflix recently had around 16,000 titles; Scarecrow boasts nearly 150,000, many rentable by mail from across the country.
“When everyone says, ‘Everything’s available online’ — which it isn’t — they look at Scarecrow as an anachronism: ‘Why should such a thing exist?’” Marlow said. “It exists because people are not satisfied with the choices they already have.”
For many fans, streaming itself — the unprecedented instant accessibility of thousands of movies and TV shows — has goosed demand for the earlier technology.
“The proliferation of media has maybe even overstimulated the appetite for newcomers to the world of film to be interested in film, and they suddenly discover that it’s enjoyable both to watch something and to have something,” said Richard Lorber, the chairman and chief executive of Kino Lorber, which has a streaming service and also distributes physical copies of movies — and whose physical business, Lorber said, is up 15 percent this year.
The Criterion Collection similarly views its streamer, the Criterion Channel, as “a gateway back to physical media collecting,” the company’s president, Peter Becker, said in an email.
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Another thing driving renewed interest in physical media is quality. A decent disc on a decent television typically provides stronger picture and sound than streaming.
“Those are highly compressed files, in order to pass across the internet easily,” Douglas McLaren, a film archivist at the University of Chicago, said of streaming. His university’s film studies center does not have any streaming subscriptions, he said, relying instead on its library of more than 7,000 videos and discs and more than 3,000 film prints.
What has maybe most marveled the more serious physical media boosters is how their hobby or passion has become kind of … cool. Criterion Closet videos, in which film personages stand in the middle of Criterion’s roster of discs and excitedly snag their favorites off the shelves, has become a viral hit. And Williamsburg — a neighborhood that has exported its sensibility across the world — now has a video store.
“We’re older millennials,” Hamel, of Night Owl, said. “We’re shocked by the number of college-age people coming in and buying a couple five-dollar DVDs to go home and watch together.”
Marc Tracy is a Times reporter covering arts and culture. He is based in New York.
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