Why Hardcore Movie Fans are Flocking to Blu-Ray
By Movieguide® Contributor
While streaming platforms are the king of content distribution, physical mediums such as DVD and Blu-ray are seeing a surprising rise in popularity among those who care about movies most.
When streaming platforms first arrived on the scene, they promised users a library of TV shows and movies hundreds of times larger than any typical person would own. Through one or two subscriptions, just about any movie a consumer may want to see would be immediately available.
However, well over a decade later, consumers must subscribe to half a dozen platforms to achieve this same level of reach, leading some hardcore movie fans to ditch streaming in favor of physical copies.
“If you buy a 4K Ultra HD, you buy a Blu-ray, it’s on your shelf, it’s yours. No company is going to break into your house and take it from you and repossess it. It’s yours and you own it,” director Christopher Nolan said last year ahead of the release of OPPENHEIMER. “That’s never really the case with any form of digital distribution.”
Complete ownership is key, considering how volatile the streaming space can be. Many titles’ availability depends on licensing, which is never guaranteed. Marvel movies, for example, used to be available on Netflix. However, when Disney decided to form Disney+, they removed that IP from Netflix, forcing users to subscribe to the new service for access. Sometimes, these licensing disputes don’t result in a new service but rather leave movies completely unavailable through streaming, making them inaccessible to anyone who does not own a physical copy.
“[There’s an idea that] ‘everything’s available on streaming,’” actor Timothy Simons told The Guardian. “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.”
Availability, however, is not the only concern fueling movie lovers’ return to the physical medium. Another factor comes from the finality in the physical medium as opposed to the alterations that can be imparted on digital copies. Recently, some companies have chosen to go back and censor certain parts of movies and TV shows they deem inappropriate, causing viewers to watch movies that are not everything they remember them to be. Other times, music changes are made due to licensing issues, again leaving viewers with an experience that is not fully authentic.
Another component in the return of Blu-ray mirrors that of vinyl records, where consumers are realizing that physical mediums often hold higher quality than their streaming counterparts. While many streaming services offer 4K streaming, this high quality can only be accessed under perfect conditions. Meanwhile, 4K Blu-ray requires slightly specialized equipment but can deliver on the quality at any time.
While streaming is only going to continue to grow, it appears that it will never fully kill off DVD and Blu-ray. While the sales of physical movies and TV shows will never return to its heights, it remains a billion-dollar business.
Movieguide® previously reported:
Director Christopher Nolan is warning people about the perils of streaming-only releases.
“There is a danger these days that if things only exist in the streaming version, they do get taken down,” he explained. “They come and go — as do broadcast versions of films, so my films will play on HBO or whatever, they’ll come and go. But the home video version is the thing that can always be there, so people can always access it. And since the 1980s, as filmmakers, we’ve taken that for granted, and now we have to make sure that there’s a way that that can continue to happen, if not the physical media.”
Nolan previously joked to an audience seeing his latest movie, OPPENHEIMER, that it was important to physically own the movie so “no evil streaming service can come steal it from you.”
While he did clarify that it was a joke, the director made it clear that he does see issues surrounding the prevalence of streaming-only releases.
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