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The film fans who refuse to surrender to streaming: ‘One day you’ll barter bread for our DVDs’

As more movies vanish from streaming services, cinephiles are rallying to physical media. Can they save a seemingly dying format?

Some film fans never gave up physical media: they’ve spent years quietly buying thrift-store discs, discarded by the many US households that no longer have DVD or Blu-ray players, and waiting for their chance to rise again. Physical media fans of all types tend to see themselves as survivalists prepping for apocalypse – “When the streaming sites took off,” someone told me, “people thought I was crazy for still collecting, but now I feel like my time has finally come” – or like the Irish monks and Arab scholars who, during the Dark Ages, are said to have protected the knowledge of antiquity while Europe burned books as firewood. Photograph: Gillian Flaccus/APStreaming isn’t wholly bad – it’s convenient, still cheaper than cable, and can give people outside metropolitan areas easier access to new series and films, including international pictures, like 2019’s Parasite, that might have been slower to circulate in the Blockbuster days.

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