"A Catastrophic Act of Cultural Destruction"

Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021): my last DVD rental?

Spider-Man: No Way Home is the current DVD I'm renting through Netflix. It may be my last, because Netflix announced it will terminate its DVD business on September 29th (discs can still be returned after that date).

Paying $9.99 per month, I haven't been an efficient user of the rental service. Sometimes the disc sits in the player for a month before viewing, or worse, it's returned because I just didn't care to watch it after all.

But I still maintain the DVD plan, because it's convenient to pay one provider instead of hunting for which streaming service is carrying the movie I want to watch. Also, many older movies cannot be found on any streaming plan:

Netflix’s recent announcement that it will discontinue its physical DVD distribution business later this year is a catastrophic act of cultural destruction...

In 2018 the film-data researcher Stephen Follows tracked the availability of the 100 top-grossing films from 1970 to 2017. Those released in the most recent decade were available via streaming, digital renting or purchase. As Mr. Follows worked back in time, however, movies became hard to find commercially. Just half of top-grossing films from the early 1970s could be streamed. Older, less profitable, experimental and independent works hardly streamed at all.

If it’s worth seeing, you may think, the magic of the marketplace will bring it to Hulu or Amazon Prime. This month the Washington Post’s Ty Burr reminds us of some movies we can’t stream: “Cocoon” (1985), directed by Ron Howard, “Short Cuts” (1993) by Robert Altman, “New York, New York” (1977) by Martin Scorsese, “Henry & June” (1990) by Philip Kaufman and “Silkwood” (1983) by Mike Nichols.

Of the 23,000-plus movies released in the U.S. since 1899, streaming services offer only 7,300—and that includes foreign titles. If a film happens to be streaming somewhere, odds are it’s on a platform you don’t pay for. The average American household subscribes to four streaming services out of the many available.

Another point in favor of DVD's: they are impervious to sneak-editing of their content. Steven Spielberg inveighed against the recent tendency to edit books and movies to make them conform to today's morality:

Spielberg acknowledged that the digital modifications [turning police guns into walkie-talkies] he made to the 20th anniversary edition of E.T. were "a mistake. I never should have done that. E.T. is a product of its era. No film should be revised based on the lenses we now are, either voluntarily, or being forced to peer through."

The director insisted that "All our movies are a kind of a signpost of where we were when we made them, what the world was like, and what the world was receiving when we got those stories out there."

If there arises a business that rents a fairly complete library of un-bowdlerized DVD's, I would be a customer.