Hot take: movies suck because there is no rental market
I've been on an interesting train of thought these past few days. I came across some criticism of a random old movie and I started thinking that the reason why I actually hate most modern movies is because they are all cowardly avoiding having any possible political interpretation for anything that happens in them. I've experienced movies that when the big fight scene starts, I'm falling asleep because I'm just so negatively invested in the characters or what will happen to them. That made me think about why so many boring, bland movies and shows keep being made, and it made me think of an opinion that the biggest reason why studios keep betting on blockbusters that are as boring as possible is that they are dependent on theatrical box office takings because streaming killed post-release revenue streams such as movie purchases.
I think that the reason for this is at least partially a symptom of the death of desire for physical media itself. Why deal with the inconvenience of physical media when you can just press a button and the movie starts playing? But at the same time I don't think this is entirely the fault of streaming services, but the fault of movie companies attempting to exert too much control over how people access their films.
I won't bore you with explanations of the limitations of streaming services. We've all been there, surely. They don't have what we want, the stuff we do want to see is spread out on a hundred different subscriptions, yada yada yada. So why do we not deal with them piecemeal? That answer comes with good news and bad news. Good news: you can! You can both buy and rent most movies that have ever been made. Bad news: it's an absolutely terrible deal if you do.
Right now there's at least three major services that allow you to buy digital movies: YouTube, Apple TV / iTunes Movies, and Prime Video. There's also the vestiges of the industry's "digital movies" initiative called Fandango at Home, previously Vudu - the one where you'd use a code you got with a DVD that said it included a digital copy. The problem with all of these services is obvious: if you buy a movie from them, you don't actually own it. They can and will take away access from you at any time for any reason they see fit.
There's an obvious solution to this: rental. It doesn't matter if they de-list a rental because you never had the illusion of ownership to begin with. But that has it's own problem: it's way too fucking expensive.
To put things into perspective, Blockbuster, before it closed down, would let you rent new releases for between $3-5 for a 1-2 day rental, while older movies could be between $1-3. Granted, this was before a lot of inflation, but those rentals also had the costs of running a store in expensive commercial real estate as well as the people who had to manage it, the cost of purchasing the media - sometimes at retail prices - and the cost of maintaining them (rewinding cassettes, cleaning and resurfacing discs, and replacing worn media).
Lets compare the cost of renting on Prime Video today.
Dicks the Musical is a somewhat niche movie unavailable to watch on streaming sites that came out more than two years ago, and the current price to rent it is $4.99. Five bucks. I should mention this is for a movie that I already watched on Hoopla via my library card for free.
Batman Returns is a blockbuster from 1992 and is available for $3.99. Four bucks. You get a one dollar discount if you want to watch something 30 years old. Fantastic.
The category that will really open your eyes is new movies. Zootopia 2 just became available for digital purchase, with no physical editions, and is not yet available on Disney+. If you want to purchase the film, it costs $29.99. Rental is $24.99. Frankly I cannot imagine a world in which the number of people who would pay for that rental exceeds the number of people who opted to pirate but would have paid if the price was at least half that.
If you forget that the major studios own their own streaming services, then this math really doesn't work out. Surely they are getting more money per stream through purchase and rental than they are with the fractional payment they would get from licensing it.
But of course you have to remember that they do own their own streaming services - it's part of why everyone's complaining after all. The major producers, by discouraging short term rentals and pushing streaming services (note that Prime Video will try to sell you one of those subscriptions if the title is available on one), they are attempting to move from producers of cultural products to yet another industry of rent seekers.
Sorry ... I just read thru your entire post, thinking you meant that there was no rental market of homes and flats for people to live in, and I kept waiting for you to get to the point, explaining why the movie industry sucked because of the real estate rental market.
Edit to add: I pretty much took myself out of the mix ... IDK ... over a decade ago. I pretty much just pirate stuff.
But also, I would note, it's not "the movie industry" so much as "the US movie industry" ... Europe makes a lot of great movies, so do a lot of other "not-Hollywood" movie industries.
Yes. Matt Damon talked about this a few years ago, how studios now want to take less risks since they don’t have that backstop. Although at home watching now constitutes movies being watched as a second screen, with people looking at their phones and only occasionally looking up at whatever’s playing at the TV.
The one thing I will push back is this:
If someone’s gonna pirate they’re gonna pirate. Lowering the price isn’t going to dissuade them from pirating. But someone that has a family would pay that amount to rent that film since in some areas it’s basically the cost of one movie ticket.
I'm gonna push back on that. On multiple occasions I have spent a few bucks to rent a movie because it was easier/faster than finding a torrent, letting it download on my seedbox, downloading it via browser from seedbox, putting it on my home server, waiting for Jellyfin to recognize it, and then finally be able to watch it. There are lot of inefficiencies in my setup, admittedly, but it's still a much cleaner experience renting than pirating.
I've also done the same with games. If it's cheap and faster than pirating, I'm always going to go that route. And I have zero ethical qualms about pirating things from big media corporations or game studios
I'll concur.
I like to pay for my media now that I have the means to and do so whenever it's practical. I subscribe to several different streaming services, some that aren't even used that often, just to have access.
A month or two ago I wanted to watch the Chainsaw Man Reze Arc movie since it'd finally become digitally available. First I checked the streaming services, but none had it (not even specialty services like Crunchyroll). Ok, I'll rent it then… except across all services, the price they were asking for a rental was US$19.99.
Yeah, no. That's just absurd. Buying it only cost $5 more, but digital "ownership" is tenuous at best and I wasn't sure if I was going to ever rewatch it, so off to the high seas it was, which turned out to be the best option anyway since there were notable differences in picture quality between the services and pirate sites had figured out which was best.
Had that rental cost $5 instead, I wouldn't have even hesitated.
I’d echo this as someone that used to pirate but doesn’t really do it anymore. It was more about user experience, cost, and effort involved. When I was younger cost was a huge factor.
Trying to figure out how and where to watch a movie a few decades ago was way harder compared to today.
Gonna jump on this wagon, especially when you could buy a DVD off of eBay for like $1-5. Yeah, we still had Blockbuster back then, but for the same cost as a rental, you could easily own it. (Also I moved out of the US about that time and no longer had access to Blockbuster.)
I'll dissent here, I guess since I'm already committed to pirating media and pay a reasonable fee for access to a premium site, why would I go back to the traditional model beyond ethical concerns?
Anecdotally, I haven't felt the need to pirate a video game in 20 years and a lot of that is due to Steam and free live service games.
You are pirating like the 2010s. I don’t watch tv or movies, but my housemates just use this TV app on the chromecast where you just search the name of what you want to watch and it will stream the torrent live without any messing around.
I also disagree with this. The vast majority of pirating is because it is more convenient than "legal" media access.
I was a happy, paying Netflix customer for a solid decade or more, back when they mailed you the DVDs. I remained a happy, paying Netflix customer for another 6-8 years of streaming, in the early days when they still had a good selection and the online service was actually good (great predictive recommender service, huge user-base review-forum, simple/intuitive search, etc -- literally everything it's not, today).
I started pirating when (and because) the streaming services started to suck.
Edit to add: Old farts like me don't suddenly decide to learn how to pirate stuff in their 40s, unless the media industry has royally screwed the pooch on traditional distribution.
Their objection is less the cost of the rental and more that the purchase cost and rental cost are identical.
The cost of "permanent" and "temporary" ownership of a license to view a thing being identical is silly at best.
He also recently shared that Netflix (and other studios) basically want movies to have a quick action scene right from the very beginning, otherwise people tune out and stop watching the movie, and move on to something else. Starting a movie with an action scene of some sort causes people to pay slightly more attention than they otherwise would have, and they're more likely to keep watching the movie past the first few minutes.
He mentioned this several time over the past month on his podcast tour while promoting The Rip.
I’m not really sure I follow. There’s plenty of what would have been direct-to-dvd garbage that just ends up on streaming services. They’re just buried in the catalog. See: war of the worlds on prime.
There’s plenty of experimental films that come out today, it’s just that the ones in the past have been curated and floated up by word of mouth. These kind of underground hits always taken time before people hear of them. That’s why it always looks like the old times is where all the interesting stuff is.
I’d also add that prestige TV has taken up some of what would normally have been feature films.
Morning Circle, In Thin Air, Sentimental Value, Twinless are some examples of movies that came out in 2025 which hipsters rate highly, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you never watched any of them.
This is basically exactly what I was going to post.
There are good movies which took risks out there, you just have to look for them. I have no idea what advertising budget they have, but that advertising isn’t reaching me.
To add to your point, during Blockbuster's heyday there existed numerous independent video rental shops creating downpressure on the prices of Blockbuster and other large chains simply because they didn't have nearly as much overhead. They ran out of the little grungy 60 year old building on the edge of town instead of in a big fancy new strip mall, didn't have as many employees to keep paid (some were run exclusively by the owner), and could drive business by carrying off-beat titles that the corpos wouldn't touch.
There is sadly no modern counterpart to the independent video rental shop, which contributes to the problem.
I miss those little hole in the wall places with niche anime titles.
There are still a handful around. One by me is doing well enough that they recently bought their building. That's a huge deal in an expensive city.
I feel you should just watch less hollywood and more EU movies for quality.
I've toyed with the idea of writing a post about the economics of exactly this topic before, but at the end of the day, it would have been a lot of writing to talk about something I'm fairly certain few people ever do. The digital movie market is a tiny percentage of the streaming market, that's for sure. So thanks for kicking off this topic!
I spent the last 2 years purchasing digital movies as an experiment. It started with Disney+ prices rising to a point that I no longer cared to pay for it. I only kept it around for the classics, so why not just "purchase" them once and never pay again?
Can they take away my digital purchases? Yes, but I don't think they will/I won't be completely heartbroken if they do. I purchase through Apple specifically because I believe they are the least likely retailer to fold. If they do fold, I believe they will resist the media companies the best. They have a good track record of not taking things from their users' libraries. There have been a few occasions of that happening with very obscure films, but 1) they usually just de-list the movie and you can still play from your Library and 2) they allow you to download an HD copy of your purchase for archival.
If they did completely fold and also remove all my purchases, then I'm mentally prepared for that as well. I view my budget for digital movie purchases as what I would have spent for streaming, which comes with no permanence anyway. So the worst case scenario is I paid for a more tailored streaming service. What's the difference if I spent $X/month at Netflix/Disney/HBO versus $X/month at iTunes/Apple? I also would view any removal of my purchases as a moral license to pirate back whatever it is I lost. I am also a little excited at the possibility that a removal of all purchases would drive a push towards a clearer definition of digital rights. For example, if a digital movie is made available anywhere by a studio, then any past purchasers of that digital movie should be allowed to watch it for free. Why should Warner be allowed to sell Harry Potter, remove it, then sell the license again elsewhere without offering it to past purchasers?
The other point about the economics of it all: I think $4/movie for a rental is actually really fair when you're comparing to the past rental market after inflation, as you compare. Plus, compared to paying for Netflix, you get ~6 rentals out of that (comparing the 4K plans, given that iTunes/Apple has high bitrate 4K streams). I likely watched less than 6 movies a month when subbed to Netflix/Disney+ anyway. If I were paying for 2 streaming services, then that's about 12 movies a month. Easy to break even or do better than streaming for my own use case. People that watch a lot will feel differently.
Movies also frequently go on sale for $5 at iTunes/Apple. With bundle deals, my average price of a movie is around $3.10. I also get Apple gift cards whenever they're on sale, so the real price out of pocket is more like $2.85/movie. I've gotten to a point where I own most movies I want and am okay with waiting for new movies to go on sale for $10/$8/$5 before I purchase them. I spend ~$20 most months now. I have a huge backlog of movies/TV shows to watch at this point in my purchased library. If I stop purchasing completely, it'll still take me another 2 or 3 years to even clear my backlog at this pace. In a way, I've just built my own, private streaming service where I handpicked all the things I want to watch.
The drawback of this approach is that there's a lot of streaming-exclusive movies/TV shows that are not available for purchase. The streaming-exclusive movies are mostly garbage. The streaming-exclusive TV shows are often good, so I miss out on the cultural zeitgeist, but as I get older, I really don't care anyway. There's way more high-quality art in existence than I'll ever be able to consume and I'm okay with missing out on some conversations at the water cooler.
tl;dr Find happiness by setting a monthly digital purchase budget ($25/month if replacing Netflix? $40/month if replacing 2 streaming services? IDK) and spend that budget on movies/TV shows on sale. Use one of the digital movie trackers and set alerts (CheapCharts or blu-ray.com). Rewatch movies you enjoy in your library sometimes. I have lived this for 2 years and can confirm that it's a viable way to live life.
I vaguely agree that this is probably the most healthy approach to avoid streaming subscriptions while also not going the piracy route.
I do feel like you're logic is optimistic here though:
I'm sure if this happened rapidly several times in a row there might be a class action lawsuit of some kind, but I'm not sure what the grounds would be really. They are explicitly selling you a license to watch a piece of media on <platform>. If that platform goes the way of VHS or DC Universe or Crackle, the only thing motivating a company to honor past license purchases of media is the hope for positive PR. And no one really seems all that concerned with backwards compatibility at the moment. Maybe this is the hypothetical use case for blockchain or something but there would have to be a pretty big sea change in politics when the end goal is "less money for IP holders".
Weirdly as much as I hate the current trends and capability of the streaming/media market at the moment. I think SaaS does kind of make sense for it. Storage and bandwidth have maintenance costs if nothing else. And I like self hosting stuff and/or having shelves of physical media but most of my extended family simply has no interest.
It just really really sucks that (like so much else) they're so rich that they're able to compete based on what they own, not the product they provide. Bezos aside, I would choose to watch a movie on Amazon over Netflix because of the functionality where they show the IMDB of the actors on screen and other info when you pause. That's simply an additional feature that I feel is nice, but they've added nothing else in the decade or so since that started. Half the streaming services barely have functional UI. They don't iterate on their product because they don't have to. If you want to watch X, you have to subscribe to their service.
I just spat out my drink at that.
$25 TO RENT A MOVIE!?
I guess the absurd rental pricing is there because they have to prop up the dying brick & mortar cinemas somehow. This feels like what you'd be paying if you also bought soda and popcorn at the cinema...
I assume that is just down to opportunistic profit maximization because a small subset of customers will just want it as soon as possible. It usually only stays on that high price for a couple of weeks before dropping back to normal levels from what I can observe in iTunes. The new Running Man is for example €6 for me, and it was in theaters just 2 months ago. About the same price considering inflation I paid to rent new titles in Blockbuster 15 years ago, but they didn't arrive so quickly. If anything, the short timeframe to rental is probably hurting the theater business as you don't have to wait as long as you did before.
Yup. All you have to do is sit on it. Give it like a few weeks and boom! It's now $6 to rent. $25 is if you are truly desperate to see it now NOW NOW!!! I'd argue that money is better spent going to the theatre then and at least making an outing out of it. The other thing is that rental will be like $25, but buying it outright will be like $26 or something. So if this really is a movie you waited your whole life for, and theatre or piracy is not an option, you add a couple bucks and at least you own it.
Ugh, you just made me realize the rental price is a small popcorn. It exists only to make the price of the large seem like less of a rip off.
It's not a ripoff, it's "paying for the experience" ;-)
Joke aside, what I do like about some of the newer theatres is the larger seats with more space. It's been ages since some asshole put their feet up on my seat to bothered me with extra noisy candy wrappers or anything of the kind. Of course, you have to pay premium, but to me it's something I am happy to pay for when I only go to the theatre 2-4 times a year. The popcorn remains as overpriced as ever tho! My wife and I usually share a small one and skip the drink altogether.
The thing that has made me reticent to go to theaters these days was learning that some are infested with bed bugs and put little effort into fixing that. I can deal with the odd rude moviegoer but the possibility of bringing those tiny devils back home is much more difficult to grapple.
Sounds crazy but I would be more willing to get to a theater that advertised regular treatments.
It really is an absurd number. Feels very much like the kind of price contractors throw out when they don't really want the job. This feels like a price set in line with that thinking. "Fuck it, I don't want to rent it to you, but if you insist, here's a stupid figure."
That jumped out at me as well, so much so that I had to double check in case there was a typo but there wasn’t. That being said, it doesn’t seem to be the norm. It’s only the case for some, not all, very recently released films. I can be wrong as I only did a cursory check, but films like One Battle After Another or Sinners can be rented for around $6-7 in the US, which seems reasonable.
I kind of agree with most of your post, but I've theorised that a lot of modern blockbuster cinema is terrible because the production companies are trying to be as inoffensive as possible. In trying to appeal to the broadest range of people possible, they end up making the most bland, milquetoast slop that I find so dull!
Part of that train of thought was actually about Boots Riley and my desire to see a second season of I'm a Virgo - which will never happen because one of the episodes is basically a primer on communism.
I imagine that the industry now also has much better means of achieving that than ever before. The shift to streaming means much more granular data on what does and doesn't appeal to people, and social meda provides an insanely quick way to both register and disseminate sentiment. You can manufacture hype, you can react quickly to lackluster response and after the fact you can evaluate whether mass appeal was achieved at an unprecedentedly granular level, taking that info with you to the next production.
One of my favorite examples of how the movie industry is reactive to social media is that there was a Sonic the Hedgehog movie where at some point late in production his eyes had been made relatively tiny compared to those of the original video game character. Fans of the franchise, not exactly known for their lack of attention to details regarding the character, were angered and made that known within minutes of the release of the first trailer or so. The studio eventually responded by redoing the character which IIRC pushed the release back much further.
Of course, this was more appealing to the fans. But I still want to see the beady-eyes cut of the Sonic movie. And Super Mario Bros (1993) is a much more fun movie than the new one.
The loss of niche specific content is a travesty. I really wish they'd make more cheap niche content. I was incredibly lucky to be able to enjoy the SciFi channel and Comedy Central during its golden age.
That's an interesting take I have not heard before, and I look forward to other reasons people put forward. I'm so far removed from the movie market at this point I am only spectator mode; I used to watch movies in theatres a lot more as a younger person, and as someone who had much more spare time being outside and more time for in person friends.
I know it’s yet another subscription, but does Mubi fill at least part of the hole? They choose specific movies and make them available for a limited time. Feels a bit like a theatre in that sense. Most titles are of the less heard of variety, though they do have some well known titles. I’m giving it a shot because I agree with the thoughts in the post here. I find a lot of new movies utterly boring. Even comedies are boring and rarely make me laugh because the jokes are so “safe” and dull. Even a silly comedy like American Pie would probably be too “offensive” these days.
I feel like there is an overabundance of horror movies and not enough good thrillers, comedies. There are some ok dramas. Sci fi and fantasy is a barren desert unless you love Star Wars or superheroes. Dungeons and Dragons was refreshing. They cancelled Wheel of Time which I thought was good. At least they are still making the Rings of Power. That show had some good moments.
A little off topic, but does anyone else notice a trend making a comeback: smoking cigarettes? Notice how much more often characters are smoking now? I am thinking it’s harder to find money to make these movies so they are going back to the classic product placement like cigarettes and alcohol. Fun times.
Mubi and The Criterion Channel is the only streaming services I find worth keeping, exactly because they do curated selections and not just fill their catalogue of random titles they got in a big bundle deal. Selections based on theme, actors, directors or decades are much more interesting to dive into than algorithmic driven recommendations.
But the hard truth also is that experimental movies that does things a bit differently aren't exactly profitable. Most of what is being produced in Europe only exists due to state funded grants for film production, as only the big ticket sellers are commercially viable. With the loss of the profits from the DVD market, the industry has shifted more towards either massive big budget blockbusters that must make a big profit, or small low budget indie productions. The middle ground has dwindled a lot.
Aside from the profitability side, now that you made me think of rentals, I think the experience was also superior to what it has become. Now, I surf apps on the Apple TV and click to rent or watch. Before, I made a point of stopping by the store, browsing in person, giving some random movie a shot because the one I was looking for was not in. Going home, after dinner, gather the family in front of the TV, fiddle with the annoying un-skippable FBI warning and sometimes weird but always unique DVD menus, and finally sink into the movie. Often without even seeing a trainer. I got to discover some great stuff that way. Everything was more intentional.
Going back a little further, as annoying as they were sometimes the movie ads at the beginning of VHS tapes would make me aware of stuff I had no idea existed. In retrospect, they probably weren’t as bad as modern unskippable interstitial streaming ads which I make a concerted effort to ignore.
Interesting ideas here, but I think another factor that has led to the decline of movie quality is the fact that movie budgets are way too high these days. Blockbuster movies used to be cheap for studios to make, but their budgets have ballooned to levels that would have been unthinkable in the 70's and 80's. Studios therefore become extremely risk averse with their products, resulting in predictable films that are palatable to the largest common denominator.
Physical releases are more tricky to talk about. For one, Sony seems to have a monopoly on Blu-ray and 4K technology, so they are likely able to charge distribution companies significant amounts of money for the privilege of physically releasing movies. These inflated costs get pushed onto consumers and were, I suspect, a significant factor that led to the death of the movie rental business and the industry's push for streaming. Now that we are in the streaming era, the studies get to have a taste of what Sony enjoyed and are able to flex their market power by jacking up rental prices.
There were definitely big blockbusters in the past that adjusted for inflation can rival those of the present, but a film like Jaws was made on a budget that in today’s money would be $55m which is a sort of range that don’t really work anymore.
On the contrary, I would say physical media is cheaper today. I paid more for VHS than I do for most Blurays today - and that isn’t even adjusted for inflation. Digital rental prices is also about on par what physical rentals Blockbuster rentals was.