This past week, I cracked open the newspaper where I attend graduate school, to find an article titled “Young people yearn for physical media. Here’s why that’s a good thing”. A few hours later, I opened YouTube to find a segment from the TODAY show titled “Burdened by Tech, Gen Z is Flocking to DVDs and VHSs”. These are just a few examples of what is becoming a critical cultural moment, one that has been stewing for several years amidst a growing dissatisfaction with the promises of technology and the corporate “own nothing and be happy” mentality. As Catholics, we can find our own place in this movement as well as critique some of its shortcomings.
The first question you may be asking yourself is “what is physical media?” This moniker extends to any type of media that is…tangible and contained within itself, which includes books, Blu-Rays, board games, some boxed video games, vinyl, and so on. There are several motivators for the interest in physical media, the most obvious of which being nostalgia.
As a kid, my family would drive once a month from our home at the time in Buffalo to visit family in Pittsburgh. While I did read a lot in the car, the most memorable part was watching DVDs on a portable player tied to the back of the front seat. On these trips, I built up a lineup of movies I watched over and over and over again- Wizard of Oz, Back to the Future, the live-action Scooby-Doo, and the Eddie Murphy-starring Haunted Mansion among others. The latter film was repeated so many times that I am pretty sure it is now a permanent section of my psyche. I remember not only watching the movies, but also poring through the special features and looking over the cases.
DVDs as a medium allowed for this possibility, not only through their tangibility, but because of their limitedness. Television does the same thing. My brother, who was born seven years after me, was never in an environment where repeated viewings were a natural thing. He has always had almost limitless choice.
Nostalgia, though, is quite a drug. The VHS and DVD era had many problems of their own. The gap in quality between theatrical release and home video was much bigger. Companies often did poor transfer jobs with many films, especially foreign ones, receiving the dreaded “pan-and-scan” treatment that cut off parts of the image. And even in comparison to high prices today, VHS tapes were especially expensive at the time and did not come with the bevy of special features and commissioned art we have now. The limitedness I mentioned before made it harder to see a wider range of films and many great films were more likely to be unnoticed or unreleased.
Nostalgia is absolutely a major cause of this moment. Yet, to leave it at that would be missing something. That something would be a cottage industry that is rapidly expanding and improving at the same time the Internet gets worse and subscription costs go up.
It is a little hard to imagine now the excitement around streaming at the end of 2019 and beginning of 2020. Disney+ launched with the phenomenon that was The Mandalorian and marked the end to the “Disney Vault” era where physical and theatrical re-releases were strictly limited. You could and still can watch just about every movie the studio ever made at any time. HBO Max launched with an incredible array of content that includes all of HBO, many classic movies under the Turner Classic Movies banner, all of Studio Ghibli’s work, and a lot of animation from Looney Tunes to Cartoon Network. The moment was so powerful that I even had a subscription to the doomed Quibi service, which deserved much better.
As the pandemic era wound down, the dream started to fade. Netflix original movies became more of a pejorative term. Disney+, Paramount+, and HBO Max started to remove large amounts of content, including shows and movies that were completely unavailable elsewhere. Warner Bros took it a step farther by cancelling projects that were finished as a tax write-off. The excuse was poor quality, but anyone who has seen The Day The Earth Blew Up knows that is wrong. And the prices, oh the prices. Disney+ launched in 2019 at $6.99 per month. Today, the same plan costs $18.99 per month. Simultaneously, companies have figured out that it is not a great long-term solution to spend huge amounts on original content. So as the price increases, the quality and quantity of content declines.
The subscription model has become increasingly dominant outside of media and people are getting tired of it. You might even be paying one to read this. Wallets are getting tight, too. Consumers can only afford to have one or two services at once, which makes streaming frankly a difficult enterprise for any company not named Netflix.
While streaming crashes and burns, physical media, at least for movies, is doing extremely well. Criterion Collection sales have become an event and people waited for hours to walk inside the famed Criterion Closet. There are now many companies regularly releasing high-quality versions of films from every era. I will get into some recommendations for that later in the article. DVDs and VHS tapes are, for now, pretty cheap. New releases can be expensive, but there is a near limitless supply of older content to consume for cheaper. Within a few miles of me, there are about four or five stores that have hundreds of DVDs and Blu-Rays for sale for a few dollars a piece.
Disillusionment about streaming and current economic conditions are another motivator for physical media, but the picture is not fully complete. Owning media physically is also a form of preservation and resistance against ownership-free technocracy.
Imagine Netflix were to shut down tomorrow and every piece of original content that was never released physically (which is most) is now only available illegally. Over the next few years, some companies might pick up the rights to some popular content for their own digital platforms. Still, much of the library goes untouched. This may seem extreme, but the exact scenario has already happened in another medium, video games.
Video games have been trending in the digital-only direction for years with many games never receiving a physical release. This has created a major preservation problem. In 2019, Nintendo shut down the digital store for the Wii. In 2023, they shut down the stores for the Wii U and the 3DS. The Xbox 360 store was closed in 2024. This left hundreds, if not thousands, of games unplayable unless they had already been purchased prior to closure. Today, only a small fraction of them have been released on newer platforms. Things are only getting worse as consoles begin to remove the disc drive and Nintendo sells physical cartridges that only act as a pass to download the game digitally.
While physical media does not last forever, it usually lasts longer than digital storefronts and can often be legally copied. Because of this, I have tried to track down my favorite films that never got full releases. The epic horror film The Empty Man was only released on DVD via Redbox. Netflix original White Noise, a perfect candidate for owning because it is both amazing and not well-known, was only put on Blu-Ray as a screener for awards voters.
As great as physical media may seem, there is a dark side: overconsumption. This world is not our home and all of our possessions ultimately mean little for our salvation. “Life does not consist in an abundance of possession” (Luke 12:15). It is a waste of time and money that could be used for better purposes to collect an inordinate amount of physical media for no reason beyond collecting itself and nostalgia. The latter can become an unhealthy dwelling on the past that can get in the way of our present responsibilities. “Do not say ‘why were the former days better than these?’ For it is not from wisdom that you ask this” (Ecclesiastes 7:10). Physical media can easily fall into the “throwaway culture” Pope Francis identified. Today’s digital subscription-based model is bad, yet that does not make any response okay. We have recently seen the rise in “graded” VHS tapes, which exist solely for speculation. Unless you are working in an archive, movies are meant to be watched and shared.
As Catholics, we should be responsible consumers. In 2023, Pope Francis spoke to the patrons of the arts in the Vatican Museums and identified in them the “conviction that each generation has a collective responsibility to cherish and preserve the priceless heritage with which we have been entrusted”. While we are not working for the Vatican Museums, we can pass on important and enriching art to our communities and future generations. Physical media can be a way of doing that.
If you do want to join the craze, I have a few tips and companies to check out. Format is a big deal and can be a little confusing to newcomers. DVDs are the commonly-used term, but are actually an older format that is low-quality by today’s standards. There are still plenty of reasons to collect DVDs as they are usually very cheap and many films have not been released on better formats. The successor to the DVD is the Blu-Ray, which has now been succeeded by the 4K Blu-Ray. The latter is still relatively niche, and most films are released on all three formats.
I highly recommend 4K discs despite the rarity of cheap ones. They are the best possible way to watch a film at home and look far better than 4K films on streaming, which are constrained by network rates. If you own a PlayStation 5 or an Xbox Series X that has a disc drive, you can play them. It is also possible to pick up used players for $100 or less. They also play regular Blu-Rays and DVDs.
As for companies releasing films, the best place to start is the Criterion Collection, which has been around since laserdisc. Their goal is to create high-quality releases of the best films ever made. The trade-off is that they are the most expensive with 4Ks going for as much as $50 new. I only buy from them during their 24-hour sales, which usually happen in late March and November, or the annual Barnes & Noble 50% off event.
I would also recommend Kino Lorber, which has a huge catalog from new indie films to the silent era. They have been putting out 4K discs of movies like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the original Pink Panther, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, and more. Their catalog is also full of great non-4K disc releases. The special features offered are usually less than that of Criterion and some other companies, but more than the studios themselves tend to offer.
There are many, many companies and I will shout out two more. Flicker Alley puts out a small handful of releases each year that are remastered well and full of special features. For example, they recently put out Cecil B. DeMille’s The King of Kings, which includes an audio commentary, three different scores, and a variety of making-of videos. The movies they choose tend to be from the silent and early sound eras. Finally, there is Arrow Video, which is basically the Criterion Collection of blockbusters. In addition to hours of special features, they will often release alternative cuts of films never or rarely seen before. They have good sales a few times a year.
Physical media is a fad and that means it will likely fade out of the mainstream soon. What then? Will the digital and subscription model still win out? We cannot know. What we can do now as Catholics is to engage in the culture to help guide it towards the dignity of the person and the glory of God. Sometimes, that may require owning the Criterion of The Tree of Life.
Got a sick physical media collection you’d like to share? Send pictures to 100catholicmovies@gmail.com with your name (just first name is okay), place of residence (optional) and a paragraph describing it. If we get enough, we’ll do a whole post presenting them!
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Great post. Sharing on Reddit.
https://www.reddit.com/r/4kbluray/
https://www.reddit.com/r/4kbluray/comments/1rp22v9/catholics_collecting_discs/