The film fans who refuse to surrender to streaming: ‘One day you’ll barter bread for our DVDs’
When a hurricane struck Florida in 2018, Christina’s neighborhood lost electricity, cell service and internet. For four weeks her family was cut off from the world, their days dictated by the rising and setting sun. But Christina did have a vast collection of movies on DVD and Blu-ray, and a portable player that could be charged from an emergency generator.
Word got around. The family’s library of physical films and books became a kind of currency. Neighbors offered bottled water or jars of peanut butter for access. The 1989 Tom Hanks comedy The ’Burbs was an inexplicably valuable commodity, as were movies that could captivate restless and anxious children.
“I don’t think 99% of people in America would ever stop to think, ‘What would I do if I woke up tomorrow and all access to digital media disappeared?’ But we know,” Christina told me. “We’ve lived it. We’ll never give up our collection. Ever. And maybe, one day, you’ll be the one to come and barter a loaf of bread for our DVD of Casino.”
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-ondemand 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-highdefinition 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.
My Damascene moment came last year, after one too many times I couldn’t find films I wanted on my streaming services. I started borrowing DVDs from the public library, and buying my favorites on Blu-ray. I wondered if other people had come full circle. On a recent evening, I posted on some online forums for movie buffs, asking if anyone still bought physical media and wanted to talk.
I got 180 emails. People cited all sorts of reasons for refusing to give up physical media: desire to protect old or obscure films; nostalgia; fear that streaming services will retroactively censor films; physical media’s dramatically better audiovisual fidelity; fondness for behind-the-scenes featurettes and other bonus content included on discs; distaste for the numbing nightly ritual of scrolling streaming menus.
Several people said that owning physical films made family movie nights feel more intentional, or that they prize their old movies because Hollywood’s recent output disappoints them. “Last week my older son chose Cast Away,” Ken, in Seattle, told me. “It was such a memorable family film, and drew us in more than any flick highlighted on the AppleTV home screen.” Others said they live in rural areas where slow internet makes streaming unreliable.
Every person said they worry about losing access to films – a not irrational fear. Cillian Murphy just won the Oscar for best actor for Oppenheimer, but the movie that made him a star, 2002’s critically lauded and commercially successful 28 Days Later, is virtually impossible to stream. It’s also out of print on disc, with used copies fetching $60 or $70 on eBay.
It’s partly for this reason that the actor Timothy Simons, best known as Jonah on Veep, prefers physical films. There’s a notion that, “you know, ‘Everything’s available on streaming,’” he told me. “Well, it kind of isn’t. And the thing that is available on streaming could just not be tomorrow, if two companies you don’t care about get in a fight about licensing.”
Some enthusiasts are intense, even maniacal, collectors. On the Tonight Show, the actor Carrie Coon recently said that she and her husband, the playwright and actor Tracy Letts, have 10,000 Blu-rays: “My husband’s a very sick man,” she joked, who meticulously researches films on a website called DVDBeaver. “I thought he was looking at porn.” Other people are more casual and recent converts, like the recovering “minimalist” vlogger who recently issued a sheepish mea culpa on YouTube: “I regret decluttering my DVDs.”
Physical media fans of all types tend to see themselves as survivalists prepping for apocalypse – “When the streaming sites took off,” someone told me, “people thought I was crazy for still collecting, but now I feel like my time has finally come” – or like the Irish monks and Arab scholars who, during the Dark Ages, are said to have protected the knowledge of antiquity while Europe burned books as firewood.
Streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu, and Apple TV+ were going to make physical media – and cable – pointless. We would be able to access our favorite films at any time, according to the theory, by finding them on our subscription services, renting them by video-on-demand, or buying digital copies that would be stored for us forever in a mysterious cloud.
It was all so glorious: we would have fewer boxes to carry when we moved. Our Ikea bookcases, freed of the agonizing weight of literature and film, could instead carry the random decorative art pieces for which they yearned. Instead of movies, we would watch prestige miniseries, which are like films, but padded out to eight hours by unnecessary subplots and traumarelated backstories.
Blu-rays – which look like DVDs, but are high-definition and store more data – had the misfortune to arrive in 2006, a year before Netflix unveiled its streaming service. By as early as 2012, more Americans were paying to watch movies online than on physical media; DVD and Blu-ray sales have declined since. But holdouts remain.
“I’m bummed. I go to Target now and I see their selection has gotten smaller and prices higher,” Amanda Bowman, in Michigan, told me. “I just feel like [companies] are trying to herd people into streaming. It’s frustrating. It’s also isolating.” She once worked at a video store and misses its sense of community.
Physical video rental stores have almost vanished, though you can still rent from one of thousands of Redbox vending machines left in the US, the non-profits Scarecrow Video in Seattle and Movie Madness in Portland, and a lone Blockbuster that stands vigil in Bend, Oregon. People “have come from all over the world to rent movies”, the Blockbuster’s manager wrote in the Guardian in 2019. “[W]e’ve set up close to 5,000 new memberships. Maybe 20% of those were one-time users who just wanted the Blockbuster card, but the rest are regulars to varying degrees.”
Derek Loman, in Missouri, told me he was so nostalgic for the old days that he turned his home office into a replica 90s video store, complete with a candy aisle and a door in the back marked ADULT. Ken, in Seattle, used to look forward to stopping by retail chains to browse new DVD and Blu-ray offerings; now, “I’ve kind of lost all my interest in visiting Best Buy at all,” he said. Physical media was “kind of like their Costco hotdog”.
Streaming isn’t wholly bad – it’s convenient, still cheaper than cable, and can give people outside metropolitan areas easier access to new series and films, including international pictures, like 2019’s Parasite, that might have been slower to circulate in the Blockbuster days. Amy Jo Smith, the president of the Digital Entertainment Group, a home video trade association, thinks consumers like having different format options.
“Sometimes you want steak, sometimes hamburger, sometimes just feed me whatever,” she told me. “And I think what you’re seeing now is that consumers realize that they’re in the driver’s seat.” She added that she can’t predict the future of physical media. “I think it’s continuing to decline except you don’t see it actually going away, for the reasons you might call out.”
Yet physical media’s decline has had side-effects – including, according to Matt Damon, worse films.
“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”.
And, contrary to streaming’s promise, you can’t actually watch whatever, whenever. Constricted by licensing and pressure to promote their own content, streamers seem to have ever weaker and more unpredictable libraries. Consumers who thought they would only have to pay for one or two subscriptions ended up with three, or four or five.
Film fans have also been unsettled to discover that the digital versions of films or series they love are not always what they remember. Disney removed a racial slur from 1971’s The French Connection in a way that sanitized its ugly protagonist, “Popeye” Doyle. Other times, iconic needle-drop moments now have different music, for rights reasons.
The other irony is that consumers who ditched physical media as old-fashioned effectively downgraded, technologically. Movies on disc don’t get pixelated or need to buffer. Ryan Verrill, who runs a news resource called Disc-Connected, worries that people are so used to streaming that they don’t realize they’re being ripped off. Streamers “say, ‘Hey, you can stream 4K,’ but it’s not 4K,” he told me. “It’s compressed beyond belief and encoded way worse than even a [regular, non-4K] Blu-ray is. Consumers pay more for a ‘4K plan’ that isn’t 4K. It’s ridiculous.”
The notion of “owning” films digitally has also soured. In 2018, longtime iTunes customers who thought they’d purchased films forever were shocked to notice that Apple sometimes deletes titles from users’ libraries for licensing reasons. Last month customers of Funimation, an anime streaming service that was acquired by Crunchyroll, learned that titles they’d bought from Funimation would be deleted.
Film discs probably aren’t permanent, either, though if stored properly they are estimated to work for at least two decades and often far longer.
“It became clear to me, roughly at the time of Netflix’s transition from sending hard-copy discs to your home to the streaming era, that there was value in retaining your own physical media,” the writer and podcaster Sean Fennessey, of The Ringer, told me. “Sometimes they just didn’t have discs I wanted. But when they moved to a streaming platform, they didn’t have anything. They had one-100th, one-1,000th, of what I was looking for.”
Fennessey was talking by videocall from his converted garage; behind him were shelves containing “north of 3,000” titles. He increasingly uses his platform on The Big Picture and The Rewatchables, two film podcasts with avid followings, to evangelize for physical media – a stance that even his cohosts find “baffling”, he said.
On a recent podcast, however, he recalled people approaching him after a live event he had hosted: “Almost all of them wanted to tell me about their most recent physical media purchases. There were questions about organization. They wanted to know [the] best labels. Something is happening. Something is growing.”
Jesse Nelson noticed things change during the pandemic. The modest online store that he and his wife ran from their home near Philadelphia, DiabolikDVD (“Demented discs from the world over”), began doing such brisk business that he moved the operation to a warehouse and hired four employees. These days he gets several hundred orders a week. The shop mainly caters to fans of horror and cult films, but customers have also started requesting more mainstream titles, like the recent sports family drama The Iron Claw.
People kept in by Covid signed up for Netflix and other streamers at unprecedented rates. Yet some – perhaps nostalgists keen to dig up childhood favorites, or cinephiles with time on their hands and itchy fingers – also found their way to physical media distributors. Arrow Video, a popular boutique distributor, saw a growth of 72% in its US business from 2020 to 2021, according to Variety.
Arrow, Criterion, Kino Lorber and BFI are probably the best known distributors, but in recent years a number of others have thrived, including Shout! Factory, Vinegar Syndrome and Severin in the US; Eureka, Indicator, Radiance and Second Sight in the UK; and Umbrella and Imprint in Australia. Some labels inspire cults of their own, with disciples arguing over which has the best remasters, special features or packaging. To help cover costs up front, many boutiques focus on limited editions; calls for preorders can inspire feeding frenzies.
Boutiques tend to begin as shoestring operations serving small but highly motivated audiences, Nelson told me. “A studio says, ‘We sold 10,000 copies of this, that’s terrible.’ But Vinegar Syndrome says, ‘We sold 10,000 copies, amazing.’”
“What we picked up on a couple of years ago,” James Keogh at Umbrella told me, “is that a lot of people now look towards distributors as tastemakers, or curators, of film. There’s a whole bunch of film movements and people want to track those movements and understand more about those directors and groups.”
As with vinyl records – which are enjoying an extraordinary renaissance – the appeal is also partly aesthetic. Streaming can’t replicate the “pleasure of holding the physical representation of a cinematic experience in your hand”, Bret Wood at Kino Lorber believes. Boutique releases in particular often have beautiful packaging. Online, collectors brag of recent hauls and post “shelfies”. Discs’ special features are a wealth of information, as well; fans as well as many film-makers have described discs’ behind-the-scenes featurettes as a free film school.
Fans have been excited by the growth of 4K Blu-rays, which offer what may be the final format of home theater. “The quality blew me away,” one fan told me. The discs’ greater expense (for both producers and consumers) and technical requirements, however, have limited their market. Some newer video game consoles, such as the PS5 and Xbox Series X, play 4K film discs, which could conceivably help popularize them, but at the same time an increasing number of gamers are choosing consoles that don’t have disc drives at all.
Collecting physical films can become an expensive hobby quickly, though Timothy Simons urged me to remind newcomers that it doesn’t have to be: “I swear to God, most of my collection I got at one pawnshop in Atlanta that was selling Blu-rays for $2 a piece. And if you are going to buy something new, look for boutique places and homegrown stores. Support indie labels.”
There can also be an information curve, with novices navigating a dizzying number of labels and an online community given to arcane debates about the merits of particular remasters. A classic rookie error is importing a Blu-ray from abroad, then discovering it won’t play; discs are often regionlocked for rights reasons, though the motivated soon find workarounds.
Fennessey doubts physical media will ever again be the household staple it was in its DVD heyday, but he hopes more movie fans will rediscover – or just discover – its virtues.
Physical media “is a ‘you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone’ proposition”, he said. “If you care about movies, and movie history, and you want to be able to see the things that you love over time, it’s the best way to ensure that, if you can afford it. That’s my pitch.”
thing. (In rats, such effects are seen after exposure to extreme heat for a mere 15 minutes a day for one week.) Thus, with continued burning of fossil fuels, whether through direct or indirect effects, comes more dementia. Researchers have already illustrated the manners in which dementia-related hospitalisations rise with temperature. Warmer weather worsens the symptoms of neurodegeneration as well.
Prior to her move to philanthropy, Ikiz’s neuroscience research largely focused on the mechanisms underlying the neurodegenerative disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease or motor neurone disease). Today, she points to research suggesting that blue-green algae, blooming with ever-increasing frequency under a changing global climate, releases a potent neurotoxin that offers one of the most compelling causal explanations for the incidence of non-genetic ALS. Epidemiologists have, for example, identified clusters of ALS cases downwind of freshwater lakes prone to blue-green algae blooms.
It’s this flavour of research that worries her the most. Children constitute one of the populations most vulnerable to these risk factors, since such exposures appear to compound cumulatively over one’s life, and neurodegenerative diseases tend to manifest in the later years. “It doesn’t happen acutely,” says Ikiz. “Years pass, and then people get these diseases. That’s actually what really scares me about this whole thing. We are seeing air pollution exposure from wildfires. We’re seeing extreme heat. We’re seeing neurotoxin exposure. We’re in an experiment ourselves, with the brain chronically exposed to multiple toxins.”
Other scientists who have taken note of these chronic exposuresresort to similarly dramatic language as that of Nomura and Ikiz. “Hallmarks of Alzheimer disease are evolving relentlessly in metropolitan Mexico City infants, children and young adults,” is part of the title of a recent paper spearheaded by Dr Lilian Calderón-Garcidueñas, a toxicologist who directs the University of Montana’s environmental neuroprevention laboratory. The researchers investigated the contributions of urban air pollutionand ozone to biomarkers of neurodegeneration and found physical hallmarks of Alzheimer’s in 202 of the 203 brains they examined, from residents aged 11 months to 40 years old. “Alzheimer’s disease starting in the brainstem of young children and affecting 99.5% of young urbanites is a serious health crisis,” CalderónGarcidueñas and her colleagues wrote. Indeed.
Such neurodevelopmental challenges – the effects of environmental degradation on the developing and infant brain – are particularly large, given the climate prognosis. Rat pups exposed in utero to 40C heat miss brain developmental milestones. Heat exposure during neurodevelopment in zebrafish magnifies the toxic effects of lead exposure. In people, early pregnancy exposure to extreme heat is associated with a higher risk of children developing neuropsychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia and anorexia. It is also probable that the ALScausing neurotoxin can travel in the air.
Of course, these exposures only matter if you make it to an age in which neural rot has a chance to manifest. Neurodegenerative disease mostly makes itself known in middle-aged and elderly people. But, on the other hand, the brain-eating amoeba likely to spread as a result of the climate crisis – which is 97% fatal and will kill someone in a week – mostly infects children who swim in lakes. As children do.
A coordinated effort to fully understand and appreciate the neurological costs of the climate crisis does not yet exist. Ikiz is seeking to rectify this. In spring 2024, she will convene the first meeting of a team of neurologists, neuroscientists and planetary scientists, under the banner of the International Neuro Climate Working Group.
The goal of the working group (which, full disclosure, I have been invited to join) is to wrap a collective head around the problem and seek to recommend treatment practices and policy recommendations accordingly, before society finds itself in the midst of overlapping epidemics. The number of people living with Alzheimer’s is expected to triple by 2050, says Ikiz – and that’s without taking the climate crisis into account. “That scares me,” she says. “Because in 2050, we’ll be like: ‘Ah, this is awful. Let’s try to do something.’ But it will be too late for a lot of people.
“I think that’s why it’s really important right now, as evidence is building, as we’re understanding more, to be speaking and raising awareness on these issues,” she says. “Because we don’t want to come to that point of irreversible damage.”
For neuroscientists considering the climate problem, avoiding that point of no return implies investing in resilience research today. But this is not a story of climate anxiety and mental fortitude. “I’m not talking about psychological resilience,” says Nomura. “I’m talking about biological resilience.”
A research agenda for climatological neuroepidemiology wouldprobably bridge multiple fields and scales of analysis. It would merge insights from neurology, neurochemistry, environmental science, cognitive neuroscience and behavioural economics – from molecular dynamics to the individual brain to whole ecosystems. Nomura, for example, wants to understand how external environmental pressures influence brain health and cognitive development; who is most vulnerable to these pressures and when; and which preventive strategies might bolster neurological resilience against climate-induced stressors. Others want to price these stressors, so policymakers can readily integrate them into climateaction cost-benefit analyses.
For Nomura, it all comes back to stress. Under the right conditions, prenatal exposure to stress can be protective, she says. “It’s like an inoculation, right? You’re artificially exposed to something in utero and you become better at handling it – as long as it is not overwhelmingly toxic.” Stress in pregnancy, in moderation, can perhaps help immunise the foetus against the most deleterious effects of stress later in life. “But everybody has a breaking point,” she says.
Identifying these breaking points is a core challenge of Nomura’s work. And it’s a particularly thorny challenge, in that as a matter of both research ethics and atmospheric physics, she and her colleagues can’t just gin up a hurricane and selectively expose expecting mothers to it. “Human research in this field is limited in a way. We cannot run the gold standard of randomised clinical trials,” she says. “We cannot do it. So we have to take advantage of this horrible natural disaster.”
Recently, Nomura and her colleagues have begun to turn their attention to the developmental effects of heat. They will apply similar methods to those they applied to understanding the effects of Hurricane Sandy – establishing natural cohorts and charting the developmental trajectories in which they’re interested.
The work necessarily proceeds slowly, in part because human research is further complicated by the fact that it takes people longer than animals to develop. Rats zoom through infancy and are sexually mature by about six weeks, whereas for humans it takes more than a decade. “That’s a reason this longitudinal study is really important – and a reason why we cannot just get started on the question right now,” says Nomura. “You cannot buy 10 years’ time. You cannot buy 12 years’ time.” You must wait. And so she waits, and she measures, as the waves continue to crash.