Movies and TV Shows

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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.

Derek Loman, in Missouri, told me he was so nostalgic for the old days that he turned his home office into a replica 90s video store, complete with a candy aisle and a door in the back marked ADULT.

Streaming 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.

“It became clear to me, roughly at the time of Netflix’s transition from sending hard-copy discs to your home to the streaming era, that there was value in retaining your own physical media,” the writer and podcaster Sean Fennessey, of The Ringer, told me.

The modest online store that he and his wife ran from their home near Philadelphia, DiabolikDVD (“Demented discs from the world over”), began doing such brisk business that he moved the operation to a warehouse and hired four employees.

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