Hunting for something good to watch.
Anyone who’s been visiting this site for a while probably knows that I’m a Luddite. I’m inclined to think that the Internet was a wrong turn, and I’m convinced social media has been a disaster. Despite still reviewing new books regularly, I don’t have an e-reader and I only buy “real” books, which not only furnish a room but fill up an entire house.
When it comes to movies I’m the same way. I watch movies on DVD. Not Blu-Ray, but DVD. And I’ve never signed up with any of the streaming platforms.
But streaming is, clearly, the way studios want to go. They’ve given up on cinemas, are grudging about DVD releases, and want to shepherd as many viewers as possible into their proprietary pens, paying monthly fees. This has led to some curious results. Like, for example, how expensive DVDs have become. I would have thought that as they became out of date they would fall in price because nobody wanted them, but instead I find most titles on Amazon (the store, not the streaming platform) now running anywhere from two to five times as much as they cost five or ten years ago. Is it because they aren’t making them anymore? Luckily, I already have a pretty good collection and get almost all the new DVDs I watch from the library. I think I’ve only bought a couple in the last few years.
But another result of the studios switching to streaming is that some movies, including major releases, aren’t coming out on DVD at all, so that I can’t see them. I’ll just take two examples from last year: Prey (a.k.a. Predator 5) and Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery. Both of these were what I would consider to be big titles: one the well-received latest instalment in a popular action franchise and the other a sequel to a popular star-studded hit from a few years earlier. I would like to see both, but still haven’t seen either because they haven’t been released on DVD and I’m not sure if they ever will be. Prey was released on Hulu in the U.S. and Disney+ internationally. Glass Onion was a Netflix original. These companies want subscribers, they don’t want you buying DVDs. The latter is a market, and a technology, they’ve declared war on.
I don’t know how this will play out for future audiences. Effectively everything is turning into pay-per-view, and I’m not going to go there. But then I’m getting older, and I’m comfortable with what I have. There are more books and movies in my house than I’ll ever be able to re-read and re-watch. As for the new stuff, well: I didn’t give up on movies, they gave up on me.
Update, January 3 2023:
Prey finally did come out on DVD over a year later. I reviewed it here.
Alex Good 