Physical Media and the future of "old movies"

Walmart old movie display March 10, 2025 – click to enlarge.

Physical Media and the future of "old movies"

Warnings about the demise of physical media have been reverberating for years. The signs of the collapse of DVD/Blu Ray sales has been evident just by looking at the retailer situation for discount stores like Wal-Mart, Target, and the big grocery store chains: smaller and smaller sections of space dedicated to physical media, and in the case of grocery stores and Target, very limited space and only then if related to a heavily marketed "major" film. Wal-Mart has been a little different by hanging-on longer, but they too are subtracting store area for movies. This certainly must be a reflection that sales no longer justify space or the time for staff to keep the shelves stocked and organized (hence the sometimes "abandoned" appearance of a Wal-Mart movie section).

But the story isn't over yet, and while collector specialists like Criterion and Kino continue with a few new releases of remastered or restored "old" films still appearing monthly (amid releases of newer stuff, often foreign films or niche "art films"), there is the reality that streaming, which is the main culprit blamed for the demise of physical media, has hit a ceiling of some kind. The large streaming services have seen subscription numbers erode, or in the case of the biggest and oldest mainstream service, NetFlix, there is the maneuver of simply choosing to no longer publish subscription numbers going forward, a hint of what's happening.

What does it mean if streaming cannot keep expanding? Well, there's the simple fact that there's only so many people on the planet, and only a much smaller subset of those people can obtain a network connection to even use streaming, and inside that smaller subset are the people actually willing to spend the money to sign up to streaming services, and thus we arrive at the final "real" numbers in which NetFlix, Disney+, HBO Max, Paramount+ and so on all fight over a slice of a pie that appears to be shrinking (possibly directly related to the recession-like atmosphere in many countries's current GDP growth). The global estimated "streaming" audience is thought to be 1.6 billion people, but the portion of those who actually pay for streaming is only 300 million.

How much the loss of physical media has impacted Hollywood has been a topic for awhile. Whatever gleaming piles of money might have seemed to be had by switching from manufacturing and distributing to just zipping bytes of data over the internet has instead begun to turn into what happened to the music industry when Napster came along: it cut the music industry almost in half, reducing what had been a $40+ billion per year industry (in 1999 dollars) worldwide to a $28 billion one in 2020 (approximately only $14 billion in 1999 dollars).

An unexpected effect of streaming has been the reduction of films, whatever the size and budget at their original production, into little thumbnails on a streaming channel's carousel of offerings, meaning the cheapest exploitation title is on an equal footing to a Hollywood production that cost $100's of millions of dollars to make.

Entertainment Dollars Moving Elsewhere

Meanwhile, entertainment dollars have been moving elsewhere: the gaming industry was estimated at $184.3 billion in revenues for 2024, Hollywood box office that year was $8.56 billion. But in the larger context of streaming, which is estimated at $674 billion in revenue for 2024, only some $10 billion of that number was from gaming (meaning gamers are primarily using other networks instead of the streaming services). So are the studios making up for a smaller box office number earnings with streaming service earnings? Some $20 billion in 2024 was made in streaming by selling digital copies of films, renting films, and in live events like wrestling. How much of that $20 billion comes from "old movies" versus new ones (or even movies versus wrestling) is not known. With streaming, the biggest chunk of money comes from subscriptions, some $100+ billion.

The challenge for "old movies"

Perhaps the biggest challenge for old films going into a digital future is to be recognized as having value. The old system of broadcast TV meant a regular churn of older films being rotated through the off-prime hours of a TV station, and a "captive" audience with a limited number of viewing options meant, whether they had enthusiasm for it or not, many sets of eyes for older movies because there was simply not much else "on," and more than a few "old movie fans" came from this reluctant exposure to the production history of Hollywood. Also, the TV stations would trumpet their offerings as either quality stuff, or at least exciting stuff, no matter how bad the reputation might be for a "stinker" they were airing as part of a package of movies they licensed, and this in-house marketing helped to bring eyes to viewing old films.

That situation is obviously changed dramatically with streaming services offering so many "channels" that they probably cannot be counted and have the same number day-to-day, and except for prime films and prime TV shows, "boosting" a single old movie among hundreds (or thousands) of old movies on a service just isn't happening.

But, more so, the old "curse" of black and white movies being, well, black and white has come back to reduce the number of voluntary watchers even further, and "old movies" are slowly being relegated into a situation that, like wine enthusiasts, you have to "learn" old black and white movies before you can enjoy them, or perhaps even worse, it is like learning a foreign language for the "normies" out there watching TV, getting passed that prejudice against black and white fare that seems to particularly include young people.

What's Free is Also What's On

But, old films have an advantage in the world of streaming that newer Hollywood doesn't have: they're cheap to licence by comparison, and streaming services have an insatiable appetite for "content" and will throw everything they can get their hands on into their online systems, as if the sheer numbers of offerings might be enough to outpace a competitor. Further, with the way US Copyright law is administered, old films are steadily being moved into the "public domain" in which case the licensing costs evaporate, because they become essentially "free" movies, though you've got to obtain a usable copy to put into the system for viewing (or maybe not, the most ragged, pixillated copies of some films reside on what you'd expect to be first class systems, like the M-G-M streaming channel).

The Future

The issue at hand for old movies is whether Hollywood and every other institution and business that handles them will be able to treat the material with respect and to, whenever possible, "burnish" the reputation of the great films of the past, not just to boost revenues, but to fulfill a foundational element that goes into keeping the medium "alive" and assessable for younger generations who come to these movies with little to no introduction except to click on a thumbnail and then have it unspool before them.

Numbers for this article Physical Media and the future of "old movies" are derived chiefly from Chat GPT.

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Original Page February 18, 2025