Brendan Whelton, store manager at Bay St. Video, at the store in Toronto on Nov. 28, 2023.Christopher Katsarov/The Globe and Mail
If you are a film fan of a certain demographic – say, a 40-plus father of three children – then there is a good chance that your Christmas gift this year was a Blu-ray of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, the go-to “dad” gift of the season. Then again, maybe not: Just one week after the film’s home-market release this past November, copies of Oppenheimer were nowhere to be found anywhere – the run had, incredibly, sold out.
So much for the death of physical media.
While the prevailing narrative of the streaming wars has been one of digital manifest destiny – the inevitable supremacy of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of user-friendly streamers to replace your expensive and cluttersome DVD and Blu-ray libraries – there are heartening signs that not every consumer places so much blind faith in the cloud. While 2024 will not by any stretch mark the resurrection of physical media, it just might deliver the year that DVD lived to spin another day.
Consider the fact that, for the first time in years if not decades, Toronto saw the opening of a brand-new video store. This past October, Vinegar Syndrome popped up in the city’s west end, with the retail shop co-owned by the eponymous U.S. film restoration and distribution company specializing in the kind of cult and genre cinema that can be both difficult to find online and whose physical copies are prized by collectors. One of the store’s biggest sellers this month: a $70 limited edition 4K UHD/Blu-ray edition of David Cronenberg’s 1999 thriller eXistenZ, featuring a 40-page book and “flesh-textured” slipcase.
“You’re seeing a lot fewer mainstream films get released on physical media, so niche is the way to go – a lot of the stuff that we carry has never had a proper release before,” says Andy Williams, the store’s co-owner and director of Vinegar Syndrome’s Canadian operations. “There’s definitely been a resurgence for both us and other boutique labels like Arrow and Kino Lorber that have been constantly upping their game.”
More evidence of physical media’s stubborn refusal to play dead can be found across town, where the venerable rental and retail shop Bay Street Video (which recently celebrated its 30th anniversary) delivered some astounding figures for 2023: an 8.5-per-cent increase in sales over its biggest year ever (the pre-Netflix era of 2005) and a 19.5-per-cent increase over 2022.
The venerable rental and retail shop Bay Street Video recently celebrated its 30th anniversary.Christopher Katsarov/The Globe and Mail
According to manager Brendan Whelton, last month’s Boxing Day was Bay Street Video’s biggest single day of sales ever, beating its previous record-holder by 20 per cent, and its 2022 Boxing Day sales by almost 34 per cent. Meanwhile, the store has seen an influx in new rental memberships – almost 300 since last year – while at the same time gaining enough momentum to launch its own online store this past fall, shipping titles to such far-flung locales as Latvia and Japan.
“Your favourite movie might be on Netflix today, but will it still be there in a month, when you want to show it to someone you care about?” asks Whelton, who notes that the store had a surge in memberships in June, 2020, when Netflix’s licence for the AMC series Mad Men expired, leaving fans who had yet to finish the show desperate for episodes. “Physical media is a constant, unlike digital, where movies are subject to the whims of corporate overlords. No one is going to break into your house and take your Arrow 4K of Blackhat.”
Certainly, DVD naysayers can point to two dispiriting 2023 inflection points. In November, North America’s largest electronics retailer, Best Buy, announced that it would exit the DVD and Blu-ray business entirely. And two months earlier, Netflix – a business that started as a DVD-rental service – mailed out its very last disc, having watched its annual rental revenue plunge from US$1-billion in 2012 to US$146-million in 2022. But as Whelton and other cinephiles have articulated, there is a growing sense of distrust in the curatorial capabilities of the streaming giants.
Last year, several streamers purged thousands of hours of programming from their services in efforts to stem economic losses, including Disney+, Paramount+ and most notoriously HBO Max on the directives of its corporate owner Warner Bros. Discovery. That latter company has also recently adopted the nasty habit of shelving already-completed feature films entirely for tax write-off gains, including Batgirl and Coyote vs. Acme. (WBD’s streamer, now simply called Max, is not available in Canada, though the corporation does have a large-scale licensing agreement with Bell’s Crave.)
Then there’s the fact that several of the largest streamers suffer from poor video-resolution compression. The decision to watch, say, the Criterion Collection’s 2019 Blu of Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman or the version streaming on Netflix isn’t much of a decision at all.
Perhaps director James Cameron, who recently remastered True Lies and The Abyss for special-edition 4K discs, put it best when he said late last year that, “the streamers are denying us any access whatsoever to certain films. And I think people are responding with their natural reaction, which is, ‘I’m going to buy it, and I’m going to watch it any time I want.’ ”
That said, it takes a special, unrelenting force like Cameron to get their big-studio works on disc. By and large, consumers should brace for a reality in which the DVD and Blu market becomes that much more niche and specialized – which suits Vinegar Syndrome’s Williams just fine.
“The consumer becomes more invested when they realize that, when they’re buying one of our releases, they’re buying a film to watch but also to help continue the cost of running a business that is dedicated to restoring films – it’s all about preserving something,” says Williams, who is eyeing other Canadian cities for the next Vinegar Syndrome location. (The company already has shops in Connecticut and Colorado.)
The physical-media market is also, perhaps by necessity, a friendlier one than the streaming battlefield. Vinegar Syndrome’s wares can also be found on the shelves of Bay Street Video, alongside such standard-bearing distributors as Criterion and Shout! Studios as well as such increasingly hungry competitors as Kino Lorber, Arrow and the upstart Canadian International Pictures.
Bay Street Video delivered some astounding figures for 2023: an 8.5-per-cent increase in sales over its biggest year ever (the pre-Netflix era of 2005) and a 19.5-per-cent increase over 2022.Christopher Katsarov/The Globe and Mail
Helping buoy the optimism is a sense of cultural nostalgia for films that you can touch and stack on a shelf. Witness the handful of films and TV series (Chandler Levack’s I Like Movies, the documentary The Last Blockbuster, even, perhaps cruelly, Netflix’s sitcom Blockbuster) that are odes to a time when browsing video-store shelves was not just an errand but an almost romantic ritual.
“There is a moment now in the collective imagination when you’re seeing people who were born after the rental boom come to realize that they missed out on a certain thing,” says Whelton. “But it’s still here! We’re still here.”
Top 5 Blu-ray Releases of 2023
5. East End Hustle (Canadian International Pictures), $48: The fine folks at the upstart outfit CIP are doing their patriotic duty and then some by seeking out and restoring a wealth of forgotten or unjustly ignored Canadian films, including this enjoyably nasty exploitation flick from director Frank Vitale. Scanning the original 35 mm negative, this new 4K restoration brings the grit of seventies Montreal back to grand, scuzzy life, while a bevvy of extras provide the necessary context.
4. JFK (Shout! Factory), $82: To mark the 60th anniversary of the JFK assassination, Shout! has gone delightfully overboard with this special-edition rerelease of Oliver Stone’s still-controversial masterpiece. As epic in its extras as Stone’s original film, this is a treasure so detail-oriented that it will turn even the staunchest Stone skeptic into a hard-core believer.
3. Face/Off (Kino Lorber), $26: The best antidote to muddling through John Woo’s 2023 thriller Silent Night is revisiting this Nicolas Cage/John Travolta masterpiece. While Kino Lorber’s reissue is a little light on new bonus features, its 4K UHD remastering from the original 35 mm negative is beautiful to behold.
2. eXistenZ 4K (Vinegar Syndrome), $70: Long live the new flesh-covered slipcase! Vinegar Syndrome goes above and beyond – the essays by Justin LaLiberty and Jon Dieringer in the accompanying booklet are worth the price alone – with this two-disc set of David Cronenberg’s sci-fi classic that’s limited to 10,000 copies. (Good luck finding one.)
1. Jackie Chan: Emergence of a Superstar (Criterion), $99: The granddaddy of DVD distributors enjoyed as grand a year as ever, including the company’s doubling down on diversifying its catalogue. And for my money, Criterion’s best, or at least most satisfyingly comforting, release was this six-film collection tracing the action legend’s persona from the ground up.