Analogue Movie Night: The Return of the DVD and Physical Media
Words: Mayanne Soret
Make it stand out
“I love movies, I love watching movies,” gushes Ayo Edebiri gushes as she wraps up her selection in the Criterion Closet with a tote bag filled with DVDs. The online series, where actors, filmmakers and other movie creatives pick a selection of movies in the Criterion Collection’s dedicated DVD closet has garnered a cult following online in the past three years. It is easy to see why: the programme strikes a perfect balance between high-brow culture and authenticity. No algorithms, no For You Page, no data-driven recommendations: just your favourite movie person’s favourite movies, and the contagious excitement of a person indulging in the art form they love. The image of celebrities holding DVDs, looking up at the shelves, holding a title to their face smiling back at the camera has become a symbol of its own, evidence of a sort of renaissance around the growing desire to own the culture we love beyond the watchful eyes of Big Tech.
Streaming’s rise was so swift and so total that it is hard to remember its cultural hegemony is so recent, even when most of us have known media before on-demand video. Initially launched in the USA in 2007, it would not be until 2012 when Netflix arrived in the UK, releasing its first original programming, the successful series House of Cards, in 2013. By 2017, subscriptions to streaming services had overtaken sales of DVDs and Blu-Rays, and by the time the first pandemic lockdown was declared, in March 2020, the streaming market was apparently booming. One after the other, tech giants, broadcast companies and production houses launched their own services, from Apple and Disney, to Sky, HBO and Paramount. What happened next? Economists would tell you that the bubble burst (or so I imagine). Marketers would tell you it was subscription fatigue. I would tell you that streaming entered its flop era.
All the content was online, maybe, but dispersed across endless services and add-ons. Subscription costs piled up, and viewers tried to keep track of where to watch their favourite movies. While Netflix had already gained a reputation of producing shows as fast as it cancelled them, the 2020s showed us that no content was safe – not even legacy TV, not even original work. In 2022, HBO Max removed its own hit-series Westworld from its platform, prompting outrage online. The following year Paramount+ announced the cancellation of its Star Trek spinoff Prodigy, removing it entirely from its catalogue only three days after the announcement.
Since then, major streamers have continued to trim their own catalogues for tax write off and cost cutting, shrinking residual payments to creatives and risking made-for-streaming content to fall into oblivion. The 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strike, led in part by streaming’s impact on residuals, was a stark reminder to the public of the increasingly precarious conditions many creatives face in the streaming economy.
As the world emerged from a pandemic that made us even more reliant on streaming platforms for comfort, the cursed bargain of on-demand entertainment became inescapable: none of the content we loved was accessible anymore, and too many of the creatives who made it were undervalued. This was not counting the creeping surveillance of streaming TV, with our worst viewing habits being mined for data to decide what gets made, what gets cancelled, and who gets shamed on Netflix’s Twitter account for watching A Christmas Prince 18 days in a row.
“But beyond convenience and nostalgia, the return of the DVD in the era of streaming stands as a conscious resistance to the subscription economy.”
This is where my love of the Criterion Closet, and more widely, of DVDs, comes in. Well DVDs might be having their redemption arc. The financial realities of the physical media market are still not great: sales of DVDs and Blu-Rays continue to drop, and major retailers have stopped stocking them entirely. But online, communities surrounding DVD ownership, including second-hand hauls and public library loans (the original Blockbuster!) continue to grow.
On Instagram and Substack, a niche of DVD collectors share their finds, with the popular account @alison.nb sharing hers and her partner’s physical media collection to 28K followers. The subreddit r/dvdcollection has also seen a major growth since the pandemic, going from just around 50K members in 2020 to one of Reddit’s top 1% with over 400K members today. And 15 years after its premiere, the Criterion Closet is now a favourite spot in the awards season press circuit. But beyond convenience and nostalgia, the return of the DVD in the era of streaming stands as a conscious resistance to the subscription economy. Over the past decade, monthly fees have slowly replaced one-off payments for every aspect of our media consumption. Taking photos? Get extra cloud storage. Music? Streaming platforms. Editing videos? Pay for the Creative Cloud. E-books? Don’t change your e-reader!
When the culture we love is on loan from profit-driven tech companies we become that much more disconnected from ourselves – our time becomes a quantifiable metric, our taste, behavioural data. We become reliant on external, private companies to preserve the culture we love, sustain the artists that make it, and shape the cultural narrative of our times. Individual ownership is not a perfect solution, but a move back to the boxset could help us create a more intimate, more intentional, relationship to the art we love.
