The death of DVDs and how it has damaged Hollywood

Home video money and how Hollywood has been caught flat-footed with streaming

The death of DVDs and how it has damaged Hollywood – You Tube

Video conversation has a segment of Hollywood movie star Matt Damon talking about how DVDs were an important part of the calculation on earnings for a film, and that streaming has come along and destroyed that.

"...the movies that we used to make, you could afford to not make all your money when it played in the theater, because you knew you had the DVD coming behind the release, and six month later you'd get a whole 'nother chunk, it'd be like reopening the movie, almost. When that went away, that changed the kind of movies you could make."

Damon goes on to describe how difficult it is to make a film now that has to spend approximately $50 million dollars to advertise itself, and in effect creates a threshold for what can be financed with a reasonable hope of getting the money back. One of the results of streaming, not mentioned in this conversation, is that to penetrate past the avalanche of product, old and new, is expensive and is not getting cheaper.

Another item not addressed, though mentioned as a side item in the conversation within the YouTube video, is the phenomenon of viewers sitting at home and roaming through streaming channels looking for something to watch and how this compares to the older home video culture of choosing what to watch. Not pointed out is that when the purchase of a DVD or the rental of a DVD was made at a retail store, the "choice" of what to watch had in effect been made, and the only action left was to be at home and have the time to conclude the decision. The plethora of choices available through streaming is instead a decision demanding to be made whether one is ready to make choices or not, and this is different from the desire to be entertained.

All that said, the battle between "permanent media" and streaming is an ongoing fight, and though streaming clearly has the upper hand, the tide could change later much in the way that vinyl records made a comeback, and book-reading has been able to consolidate into a core audience that isn't going away and is keeping chains like Barnes and Noble going.

Finally, another item belonging to this subject that isn't addressed is the dramatic change in hierarchy of films. On a streaming channel using a typical carousel browsing screen, all movies are basically equal and the cheapest, dullest "feature" film can sport an effective and attractive "thumbnail" image that competes with an equally sized "thumbnail" image for an expensive high-budget Hollywood movie.

During the age of newspaper and magazine dominance, expensive films paid for larger advertisements and cheaper stuff paid for the smaller spaces. Newspaper film critics rarely ventured into the cheap exploitation stuff but instead was preoccupied with that week's major releases, which directly reflected the main interests of the audience of the critic.

This has changed dramatically since the age of newspaper, and though film critics and entertainment news is still mainly preoccupied with the glories of official Hollywood releases and stars, entertainment news of this sort doesn't have the audience it once did, but has fragmented into YouTube channels like the one here (Salty Nerd Podcast).

Again, the simple streaming carousel screen shows us a world of movies were it is all equal and deceptively, and blindingly, the same.

What's Recent

Original Page February 18, 2025