What DVDs Gave Us

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Netflix is shutting down its movie-by-mail service at the end of next month. Movie lovers will lose more than a fond memory.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The Red Envelope

The bouncing DVD logo is my Proustian madeleine. I am transported back to 2005, in the living room of a friend’s house; we are laid out on sleeping bags watching Pirates of the Caribbean; soon, we will plug in a karaoke machine and sing power ballads by Pink.

That year was the peak of the DVD era; the industry was worth $16.3 billion at the time. Since then, DVDs have declined in favor of streaming platforms, but Netflix has quietly maintained its mail-order-DVD-subscription service, sending billions of movies in red envelopes over the years. The Associated Press estimated that 1.1 million to 1.3 million people were subscribed to the service earlier this year (compared with more than 230 million subscribers to its streaming service). But now the DVD days are truly ending: The final ship date for Netflix’s discs is next month, and the company announced this week that subscribers can keep their last shipment of DVDs and opt-in for a chance to receive 10 additional ones. Netflix reportedly hasn’t yet figured out what to do with the rest of the DVDs in its possession.

The twilight of the DVD comes at a moment when members of Gen Z are taking stances against technology. Some young people are proud Luddites, eschewing smartphones for flip (or even no!) phones. And The Washington Post reported this week that a small but dedicated sector of Gen Z is big on CDs. One Zoomer recounted initially buying a CD because she thought it would be funny, before assembling an assortment—and using some as decor. Indeed, the people who still use DVDs trend young: Wired reported in 2021 that people aged 25 to 39 were more likely than other groups to still watch DVDs. Some of this may just be nostalgia. But some users are collectors too: In shoring up their private disc collections, movie lovers can stake out an identity through their taste. Others have turned to DVDs due to issues with broadband access in past years, especially in rural areas. Of course, libraries and some smaller services still rent out DVDs—and there is at least one movie-rental store still operating in New York City.

But the loss of Netflix’s service is a loss for movie access. One appeal of Netflix’s DVD program is the sheer quantity of films—including those not available on streamers because of format-dependent rights agreements—on offer. The advantage of streaming is, of course, its convenience, but one downside is that films can be plucked from platforms at any time, and many are not available on any platforms at all. As the writer Ruth Graham, who was a subscriber to Netflix’s DVD service, wrote in Slate in 2019, “The promise of streaming services was that ‘everything’ would be available at any time. Instead, a morass of legal hang-ups and commercial demands has conspired to keep countless great movies unavailable to stream.”

The spotty offerings on many platforms can make the experience of streaming a frustrating one: The other night, looking for a movie to watch, I scrolled and scrolled on a couple of streamers, past random aughties rom-coms and a grab bag of old slapsticks, and came up with nothing. I ended up giving up and rewatching a few episodes of Parks and Recreation. Even when I know what I want to watch, my choices are splayed across so many streamers that watching a film can involve the expensive hassle of getting a new subscription. I experienced a strange sensation on an airplane the other day: relief and delight at the range of movie options at my fingertips.

That encounter with abundance reminded me of the movie stores of my youth. Growing up, I lived around the corner from a Blockbuster, and my family went there on many a Friday night seeking DVDs to rent. We’d bring portable DVD players and a zip-up booklet stuffed with period dramas on our road trips. About a mile away from home was a true old-school video emporium, with film buffs manning the checkout scanners, and rows and rows of options (it closed in 2015). I discovered great films by seeing them displayed on shelves; I also got certain movie covers—such as, for some reason, The Wedding Singer’s—imprinted on my mind. The opportunity to stumble upon something new or interesting—or, because I was a kid, dumb and funny—really mattered. The store didn’t have anywhere near Netflix’s volume of DVDs, but it had a curated corpus of good movies.

I admit that I haven’t watched a DVD in recent memory, aside from an occasional screener with friends. I suppose that in clinging to the nostalgic element of DVDs but not paying for them, I’m part of the problem. Even so, I find myself more wistful than I’d expected that the DVD era is fading away. Streamers have made a subset of films available, but when so many other great movies disappear into the legal no-man’s-land between platforms, something is lost. The DVD gave audiences stable access to movies they love. This Netflix news may not affect the true DVD loyalists out there, who have already built up their private disc collections. But for casual movie fans, our viewing world has officially narrowed.

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P.S.

Before I go, I’d like to clarify that I am not a total Luddite: I read constantly on Kindle, and read ebooks interchangeably with print books (about half of the books I’ve read this year were on Kindle). I am very sympathetic to the argument for having media available on demand. Indeed, this week, just one day after a friend recommended it, I checked out Ties, by Domenico Starnone, from my library on ebook. It’s a tight, tense novel with an interesting Elena Ferrante connection. I read Jhumpa Lahiri’s English translation, which includes her elegant introduction. In my favorite scene, a character sits surrounded by scraps and notes and highlights and yes, DVDs, from decades of his writing life, considering what all of the material he’s collected tells him about himself. It’s a riveting scene—and, I realize, one that would not have been possible had he done all of his reading digitally.

— Lora

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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