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.
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.
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’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.
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’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.
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.
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.