For about ten years, the DVD made Hollywood more money than the movie theater did. A film could flop in cinemas and still turn a tidy profit once it hit the shelf at Best Buy. In 2005, discs sold around $16 billion in the US. Theaters made about half that.
That safety net changed the kind of films that got made. Since a strong disc run could cover a box-office miss, studios were willing to bet on smaller, odder movies. A scrappy comedy like Napoleon Dynamite or The Big Lebowski could rake in as much from disc sales as it ever made selling tickets, sometimes more. And the hours of behind-the-scenes extras Jackson misses got made for the same reason: the discs sold well enough to pay for them.
Then streaming showed up, and the disc money fell off a cliff. Sales sank more than 80%. By 2018, DVDs were down to barely $2 billion. By 2023, a full half-year of disc sales added up to about $754 million, less than a tenth of the old peak. With the safety net gone, the risky bets stopped. The mid-size movie, the $20 to $60 million film that filled theaters for decades, mostly stopped getting made. Hollywood's big studios put out 204 movies in 2006. By 2010, that was down to 141.
The digital version that replaced the disc comes with fine print. When you click "buy" on a movie, you're really just renting it. What you actually get is a license, a permission slip the store can take back. In late 2023, PlayStation warned customers it was about to wipe more than 1,300 shows they had already paid for. It backed off only after signing a fresh deal, and even that one expires in a couple of years. California now has a law, on the books since 2025, that makes stores admit the "buy" button is actually a rental.
Jackson's old box sets still sit on a shelf and still play, extras and all. The digital copies most people traded them for can vanish the morning a licensing contract runs out.
Peter Jackson laments the death of physical media:
“You can get Blu-rays and DVDs, but they’re almost a niche product for aficionados now,” Jackson said. “Since they only sell small numbers, no studio wants to put extended features on them or to extend the cuts. We did hours and hours of behind-the-scenes material for The Lord of the Rings DVDs, and so many people have thanked me for doing them. People would watch that stuff over and over again because it inspired them to make films. That’s all gone now, and I think it’s a real shame.”
Do you still get real books and DVDs?