We live in a digital world. That much is obvious. And with entire libraries of movies, music, TV, and games available at the click of a button from whatever “the cloud” is, it’s unsurprising that many people dont believe in collecting physical media anymore. DVDs, Blu-Rays, 4K disks. What do they really matter? To many people, they mean nothing.
But I am not many people.. At least, not on this topic. I believe physical books beat e-readers every day of the week. I believe in owning gaming systems *with* a disk drive. And I believe in spending all kinds of money on fancy new releases and beautiful re-releases from boutique distribution companies like Criterion or Vinegar Syndrome.
And I believe in all that for a few reasons. Number one, I like the collecting aspect. I like the cool covers on a retro Stephen King book, I like the box art for 4Ks like Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, and I enjoy having them on my shelves. But also.. The quality is simply better. Watching Interstellar on a 4K disk is vastly superior to watching a compressed version of Interstellar beholden to your internet streaming speeds and faraway servers for its quality. On 4K, everything looks and sounds as sharp, as, yes, Christopher Nolan intended.
And finally, media preservation is a real task. In a streaming-first world, movies and TV shows are only available so long as a given streamer stays in business and decides to keep offering that content for audiences. Shows like Mike Flanagan’s excellent Midnight Mass simply have no physical media releases, and that makes them vulnerable to disappearing. Printing shows and movies to disks and releasing them the way Criterion has released Netflix movies like Roma or The Irishman makes them more real. Re-releasing old, little-seen cult movies makes them more real too, in that they’re available right now for sale and consumption on modern entertainment systems. And keeping all of this artistic work available and interoperable into an increasingly digital future is a very worthy cause indeed.
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