The Premature Death of Physical Media and the Cult Home Video Labels Keeping It Alive

[iank]

Originally Posted by Demdike@Cult Labs

I can imagine that dvd's won't look so great on that size screen.

I still have so much tv on dvd that'll never get upgraded which would look awful on large screens that i stuck at just under 50" myself.

Plus i'm not sat very far from the screen either. Under ten feet from that lovely Quantum Dot technology.

I've got a 40 inch. I agree, I've so much old TV that any bigger would render them unwatchable. The early seasons of Buffy already look like shite on it on DVD.

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

Originally Posted by iank

I've got a 40 inch. I agree, I've so much old TV that any bigger would render them unwatchable. The early seasons of Buffy already look like shite on it on DVD.

I heard that. It's the main reason i haven't revisited them.

[Nosferatu@Cult Labs]

There's a good article in The Guardian on streaming, physical media, and the people keeping the home video market going. Some of it is below, but it's worth reading the whole piece.

Streaming was supposed to kill physical media, and has come very close. The DVD and Blu-ray market fell from $4.7bn in revenue in 2017 to barely $1.5bn in 2022. In September, Netflix ended its movie-by-mail service. Best Buy has removed physical media from its brick-and-mortar stores, and Target and Walmart may follow. Some new films may never be released physically at all.

Yet a counterrevolution has been gathering. Some film fans never gave up physical media: they've spent years quietly buying thrift-store discs, discarded by the many US households that no longer have DVD or Blu-ray players, and waiting for their chance to rise again. Other fans, frustrated by streaming's limitations, have recently rediscovered physical media and trickled to join its rear-guard army.

Physical media will never regain its heights, but it may live to fight a little longer - supported by loyalists and by a cottage industry of independent and boutique film distributors that license classic and cult films and sell high-quality physical editions to eager, sometimes frantic, fans. Some of these labels offer streaming channels or video-on-demand as well, but still find business in Blu-rays. "We've grown rather than shrunk," Umbrella Entertainment, a distributor in Australia, told me.

And when Universal released Oppenheimer on 4K Blu-ray this fall, the initial run sold out, with feverish Christopher Nolan fans pillaging the same megastores that are moving to drop physical media. 4K Blu-rays are currently the smallest slice of the film disc market, and require ultra-high-definition players and TVs, meaning that the Oppenheimer run was driven by a niche within a niche. But the episode seemed to indicate that a market exists - especially when it has champions.

Nolan himself had encouraged fans to rally to physical media: "If you buy a 4K UHD, you buy a Blu-ray, it's on your shelf, it's yours," he told IGN last year. "[Y]ou own it. That's never really the case with any form of digital distribution." Oppenheimer's producers also resisted the recent trend of giving films perfunctory theatrical releases, or none, then rushing them online.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/202...d-for-our-dvds

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

Matt Damon and I share the exact same viewpoint.

?The DVD was a huge part of our business,? the actor explained in 2021. You could ?afford to not make all of your money when [a film] played in the theater, because you knew you?d have the DVD coming behind the release, and six months later you get, you know, a whole ?nother chunk.? When ?that went away, that changed the type of movies that we could make?. Financing more adventurous or offbeat films became ?a massive gamble in a way that it wasn?t in the 1990s when they were making ? the kind of movies that I loved?.

I always say the 90's were far better for movies than anything from the last ten years bar a few exceptions. It's companies like Disney and WB totally playing it safe churning out the same tired superhero movies time after time. Granted some are still very good but the quality in them has fallen dramatically in the main.

Movies like Oppenheimer which explored different ideas were regular staples of the 90's whereas now seem to be one offs.

Excellent article by the way. There is still hope for us collectors.

[gag]

Originally Posted by Nosferatu@Cult Labs

There's a good article in The Guardian on streaming, physical media, and the people keeping the home video market going. Some of it is below, but it's worth reading the whole piece.


https://www.theguardian.com/film/202...d-for-our-dvds

Not only that streaming sites censor films left right and centre, on physical it's uncut, so many films haven't even moved from vhs to dvd or any other format, and will never get shown on tv, and won't see stuff like
Headless
Story of ricky O
Untold story
Human centipede
And many more on streaming sites,
So many tv shows and films get made some never make it onto any tv channel and as yrs go by get forgotten about.

[Nosferatu@Cult Labs]

Originally Posted by Demdike@Cult Labs

I always say the 90's were far better for movies than anything from the last ten years bar a few exceptions. It's companies like Disney and WB totally playing it safe churning out the same tired superhero movies time after time. Granted some are still very good but the quality in them has fallen dramatically in the main.

Movies like Oppenheimer which explored different ideas were regular staples of the 90's whereas now seem to be one offs.

Excellent article by the way. There is still hope for us collectors.

I first became interested in film in the 1990s, renting and buying videos of films like Leon, Fargo, Pulp Fiction, The Usual Suspects, True Romance, Seven, Interview with the Vampire, 12 Monkeys, Jumanji, Trainspotting, Primal Fear, Ed Wood, Reservoir Dogs, Speed, and even The Specialist, showed a wide range of styles. I only really became interested in horror later in the decade when films including The Exorcist and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre were released at the end of James Ferman's tenure at the BBFC.

Some of these were major studio films, others from (then) up-and-coming production companies like Miramax, most featured established and well-known actors, and they had directors with a range of experience and clout. At the time, some, like Danny Boyle, David Fincher, and Quentin Tarantino were aspiring filmmakers, whereas people like Neil Jordan, Terry Gilliam, and Tim Burton were relatively established industry figures.

[gag]

Originally Posted by Demdike@Cult Labs

Matt Damon and I share the exact same viewpoint.



I always say the 90's were far better for movies than anything from the last ten years bar a few exceptions. It's companies like Disney and WB totally playing it safe churning out the same tired superhero movies time after time. Granted some are still very good but the quality in them has fallen dramatically in the main.

Movies like Oppenheimer which explored different ideas were regular staples of the 90's whereas now seem to be one offs.

Excellent article by the way. There is still hope for us collectors.

Since around 2000 quality of films and music has drastically gone down hill, my fav era for films is 70s/80s.. especially 70s for horrors.

[Nosferatu@Cult Labs]

I have seen some genuinely great and innovative films in the last 12 months or so: Barbie, Oppenheimer, Spider-Man Across the Spider-Verse, Poor Things, Killers of the Flower Moon, American Fiction, The Zone of Interest, Godzilla Minus One, The Creator, Napoleon, Wonka, and have high hopes for The Holdovers.

I'll probably buy most of those before the end of 2024.

I've been less than enthused with some of the remakes and sequels like Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, and (Disney's) Pinocchio though.