DVD is dead. Long live DVD.

“This is a business where the buyer gets nothing for his money but a memory,” MGM founder Louis B. Mayer (Arliss Howard) says in Mank. “What he bought still belongs to the man who sold it. That’s the real magic of the movies, and don’t let anybody tell you different.”

Appropriately, Mank exists as a memory on Netflix. So too does David Fincher’s follow-up, The Killer, and thousands of other movies and TV shows exclusive to the world’s largest streamer. Only a handful of Netflix originals find domestic releases on home video, and Fincher’s work is not among them. It belongs to the men who sold it to you, Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters. 

This is the landscape in which the sad state of home video continued deteriorating in 2024. Best Buy ceased carrying DVDs this year. Target followed suit. Redbox rented its final Liam Neeson movie and shuttered its kiosks in July. Finally, LG announced just last week that it would discontinue all its UHD Blu-ray and Blu-ray players, joining Samsung and Sony in ditching the optical drive.

Over a decade into the streaming revolution, tech companies have retrained viewers on where to find and expect entertainment. They also taught them not to expect permanence. Everything is streaming now, and we don’t mean “everything is on streaming.” If that were the case, people could have watched the 2002 movie 28 Days Later digitally before…last week. Instead, everything acts like streaming: fleeting and unpredictable. Thanks to last year’s shutdowns, fewer movies were released in 2024 than in 2023. Still, despite theaters so desperate for movies that they’ll offer an auditorium to an animated Lord Of The Rings prequel, theatrical windows kept shrinking, too. That’s if the film sees release at all. Following outcries over Warner Bros. Discovery’s decision to trade Batgirl and Scoob! Holiday Haunt for a tax write-off, some hoped Coyote Vs. Acme might find a home at a different studio. Sacrilegious as it might be for a Looney Tune to appear under a different shield, that hope was about as effective as an umbrella against an anvil. Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav scrapped the finished movie without even watching it. 

It wasn’t just Warner Bros. In 2023, Disney began cutting back on its library offerings, locking dozens of titles, including brand-new ones from legacy properties, in the vault. Show creator Jon Kasdan might be “kinda into” Disney scrubbing his Willow series from Disney+, but star Warwick Davis continues to be less enthused. “It’s a travesty that ⁦⁦@DisneyPlus value shareholders over subscribers in their creative decision-making,” Davis posted on December 11. “I only ever saw each episode once!”

Streaming shows aren’t the only thing disappearing. Theatrical windows have finally adopted the Steven Soderbergh dream model. Speaking to The Atlantic in 2018 to support his Netflix movie High Flying Bird, Soderbergh laid out a distribution model that resembles our current one, arguing that “the minute” he knew Logan Lucky or Unsane were flopping, “the studio should let me drop the movie on a platform the next week. There should be a mechanism for when something dies at the box office like that.” Five years later, Soderbergh’s wish was Zaslav’s command. Two of the year’s most expensive underperformers, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga and Joker: Folie À Deux, found their theatrical windows slammed shut. Less than two weeks after the films failed to meet opening weekend expectations, both were in half as many theaters and all but gone by the end of the month. Forget about allowing movies to find their audiences (which both Furiosa and Joker have now begun to do); even sleepers-by-design can’t catch a break. Juror #2, the latest (and perhaps last) from Clint Eastwood, a director who has made over a billion dollars for WB, got a shrugged-off release for awards contention and an unceremonious dumping on Max. 

Again, it’s not just Warner Bros. Discovery. Several filmmakers spoke out against tech-run studios reversing course on theatrical releases this year. In January, amid his spat with Amazon over Road House, Doug Liman published an op-ed accusing Amazon-owned MGM of having “no interest in supporting cinemas” and using his movie “to sell plumbing fixtures.” He continued: 

Amazon will sell more toasters if it has more subscribers; it will have more subscribers if it doesn’t have to compete with movie theaters […] But a computer doesn’t know what it is like to share the experience of laughing and cheering and crying with a packed audience in a dark theater – and if Amazon has its way, future audiences won’t know either.

By the end of the year, Spider-Man: No Way Home director Jon Watts was in a similar situation. Watts made the George Clooney/Brad Pitt two-hander Wolfs, assuming it would receive a theatrical release. Ironically, its distributor Apple was a wolf in a fleece vest. “[Apple’s] last-minute shift from a promised wide theatrical release to a streaming release was a total surprise and made without any explanation or discussion,” Watts told Collider. “I wasn’t even told about it until less than a week before they announced it to the world.” Watts later confirmed to Deadline, “Apple didn’t cancel the Wolfs sequel. I did, because I no longer trusted them as a creative partner.” No wonder Apple’s big awards contender, Blitz, was mainly left online.

The impermanence, both on streaming and in theaters, shows how much power consumers have ceded to corporations and their shareholders. Just as people no longer own music collections, opting to rent monthly from Spotify, they’ve done the same with movies in a grander fashion. Recent studies have shown that Americans, on average, pay for 2.9 streaming services a month, costing them about $46. Other studies show that 62% of Americans think there are too many streaming options, each with its own unpredictable rotating library. 

The promise of streaming was always impossible. How long could these once-maverick start-ups, which vacuumed streaming rights up before the industry knew how valuable they were, continue to offer the world’s history of recorded art for a simple fee? However long we expected our liberation from cords and ads, we’re at the end of it. Two years after Netflix cracked down on passwords and launched its ad tier, Prime and Apple TV+ have followed suit. One doesn’t become a $3 trillion company by giving The Instigators away for free, and Apple’s theatrical missteps Argyle and Fly Me To The Moon didn’t help. Now, the world’s largest TV manufacturer, TCL, which revolutionized serving ads sans content, is looking to replace entertainment with AI slop. It also doesn’t help that, 15 years into the streaming revolution, most subscribers still opt to watch licensed material produced by traditional networks and studios. “The new shows can come and go,” said former NBC Studios president Tom Nunan. But it’s Suits and The Office that keep people subscribing.

Outside of piracy, the only thing consumers can do is invest in permanence. To wit, the right time to start collecting physical media is immediately. While optical drives became an even more endangered species, there were some moments of hope. Retailers that announced the end of DVDs struggled to keep Oppenheimer 4Ks on the shelf. People love to meme Christopher Nolan’s analog advocacy, but he’s right. There is a risk that an “evil streaming service can come to steal” movies from personal devices. Just ask Indiana Jones. Recently, Disney lost the rights to stream the first four Indiana Jones movies. However, fans can always watch The Dial Of Destiny, the only Jones film on Disney+.

Nolan explained how a company like Disney losing a jewel of the $4 billion Lucasfilm empire they bought more than a decade ago is business as usual:

The danger I’m talking about with a filmmaker’s film just sort of disappearing from streaming one day and then maybe not coming back or not coming back for a long period of time, that’s not an intentional conspiracy. That’s just a way that with the particular licensing agreements, the way things are evolving.

But while the doom and gloom of the industry could weigh heavy, physical media has rarely felt more joyous. Fourteen years after Guillermo del Toro made his first Closet picks for an impromptu Facebook video, Criterion made its storage room between two bathrooms the company mascot. GQ noted that the Criterion Closet videos had a similar effect as Hot Ones, the rare opportunity to see “actors and other film professionals outside the usual promotional context,” becoming the “least cynical part on the press tour.” The joy of the videos is seeing Willem Dafoe talk about Onibaba or Maya Hawke recommending 3 Women, leading with a reverence for art rather than content. In a world where studios seemingly resent having to make, let alone release, motion pictures, producers of physical media have made their brands on love and curiosity for the medium. It’s a stark contrast from how artists like Dafoe see streaming consumption.

“People go home, and they shop around on these streaming platforms,” the actor told Vulture. “There’s some good things about the platforms. They create a lot of movies. They create a lot of jobs. But there’s so many distractions that you can’t enter the stuff. People watch five minutes of something and they say, ‘I’m not really into it’ and they go to another thing. ‘I’m not really into it.’ Then another thing. ‘I’m not really into it.’ Then they go to bed. If you don’t put in the effort, you’re not going to receive much. And the discourse gets lowered, and everything gets a little more dumbed down and then that’s when the ruffians come in, and they’re the ones with energy and stupidity and then they can crush all the thoughtful people. That’s not good for culture, and that’s not good for humanity. We see the results of that all the time.”

But those are the big guys. Independent DVD rental houses and repertory theaters are also having a rebirth. And we’re not just talking about the successful re-releases of Interstellar and Coraline. As some theater chains in North America contemplated evolving into Dave & Busters, rep theaters saw a surge in popularity. Meanwhile, as everyone waxes nostalgic about going to Blockbuster, indie video stores are giving cinephiles the real deal. Stores like Scarecrow Video in Seattle and Vidiots in Los Angeles build communities that unite film fans who want to see and appreciate movies. People don’t travel from across the globe to stream Damsel, but they will drive 350 miles to see Interstellar in IMAX. 

In 2024, the future of streaming has never looked shakier. The products, practically and creatively, are getting worse, and the waning enthusiasm from companies like Apple represents a chance to break this cycle. Investing in physical media at least partially separates oneself from a system failing its consumers and ensures that the thing you want to watch is always available. A Blu-ray won’t suddenly sprout advertisements or disappear from your collection. It’s one of the reasons that buying DVDs has felt so empowering this year. Physical discs continue spinning as the mainstream model cuts its nose to spite its face. In a media landscape where the only sure thing is that there are no sure things, our best bet is still to put a disc in a drive.