Released: 1998, 2002, 2004

Directors: Stephen Norrington, Guillermo del Toro, David S. Goyer

Run Time: 120, 117, 122 minutes

Rated R

Distributor: New Line Cinema

Genre: Action/Horror

Cast:
Wesley Snipes: Blade
Kris Kristofferson: Whistler
Stephen Dorff: Deacon Frost
Luke Goss: Nomak
Dominic Purcell: Drake
N’Bushe Wright: Karen
Leonore Varella: Nyssa
Jessica Biel: Abigail
Donal Logue: Quinn
Ron Perlman: Reinhardt
Ryan Reynolds: Hannibal King

Last week, I made a post about issues over at Marvel Studios/Disney.  I mentioned that there was a lot of internal issues surrounding the studio and their decisions.  The quality of Marvel’s movies over the past couple of years have been very mixed, to put it politely.  But one of the most anticipated projects, Blade, has had numerous issues including the departure of TWO directors and FIVE writers.  Apparently, the upcoming film’s star, Mahershala Ali was about ready to leave the project when studio executive Kevin Feige stepped in and brought in a brand new writer, Michael Greene to pen the new film.  I would not have blamed the two-time Oscar-winner for leaving because of some seriously shit scripts that were tossed his way.  One of them would’ve been the FOURTH lead in a movie about Blade.  So, hopefully Mr. Feige’s getting things sorted out over there, because I want to see Ali’s interpretation of Blade.  He’s a fantastic actor, and he deserves a shot.  But for now, we’ve got Wesley Snipes’ movies to watch.  All three of them, and that’s what I’m looking at today.  There will be spoilers so be warned.

Wesley Snipes plays Blade, a half-human half-vampire that can survive in sunlight, hence the name Daywalker.  He was born a Daywalker because his mother was bitten by a vampire while he was in utero.  So, he was born with all of their strengths and none of their weaknesses, except for the thirst for blood, which he quenches using a form of serum.  The first film sees a couple entering a rave party that literally becomes a blood bath.  Enter Blade as he lays waste to the vampires in spectacular fashion, which ends with him immolating Quinn, the second-in-command of one Deacon Frost.  In the film, it was Deacon that bit Blade’s mother.  He has a mentor, Whistler, who spared him when he was a kid and trained him to fight vampires.  It seems that Deacon is trying to awaken an all-powerful Blood God named La Magra and needs Blade to do it.

The second film sees Blade traveling to Prague in search of Whistler, who ended up shooting himself after being bitten, but didn’t actually die.  So, with a new partner, Scud, Blade finds Whistler in a vat of blood.  Their hideout is attacked by two assassins trained to kill Blade when they offer him a truce by vampire nation’s ruling lord.  It turns out there’s a new threat on the streets called the Reapers, a new vampire off-shoot, so they recruit Blade to lead a team to hunt down and destroy the threat that’s being led by Nomak.  The final film has Blade facing off against the vampire nation when they bring in the ultimate vampire: Dracula.  Teaming up with Whistler’s daughter, Abigail and her partner Hannibal King, Blade goes to war against the vampires.

It’s remarkable how well the Blade movies hold up after 20+ years.  Well, the first two movies anyway.  Trinity has…problems.  But the first movie gave us our first black superhero.  It was also the first comic-book movie since Tim Burton’s Batman that audiences took seriously.  Yeah, Bryan Singer’s X-Men was important in supercharging the genre into what it is today, but Blade was the first truly successful Marvel movie.  And it was rated R.  It took audiences by storm.  It also solidified Wesley Snipes as a bonafide action star.  He’s simply magnetic to watch, and it helps that he’s a legitimate martial artist in his own right, holding multiple black belts in several different disciplines.  The movie has OTHER interesting characters like Whistler, played by Kris Kristofferson.  N’bushe Wright plays Karen, a bite victim that Blade saves and becomes a crucial part of his crew.  She’s fantastic because she’s not a damsel in distress.  She can handle herself.  As far as the villains go, Stephen Dorff just nails it as Deacon Frost.  He’s charismatic, charming, and an absolutely vile blood-sucker.  Quinn is basically the comic relief, played to perfection by Donal Logue.  It’s a fantastic film that holds up incredibly well.

Blade II takes a more horror-oriented approach thanks to the brilliant mind of Guillermo del Toro.  This movie takes everything that was good narratively about the first film and ups the ante considerably.  Introducing a new breed of vampire in the Reapers gives the film that horror flavor that the original film kind of lacked.  But this film also opens up the world of the vampires even more with the introduction Damoskinos, the vampire overlord.  We get to see the hierarchy of the vampire nation.  Bringing in a new team for Blade to lead, the “Blood Pack” brings a whole new level of tension.  It’s led by Reinhardt, played by Ron Perlman.  The film also gives us Donnie Yen as Snowman, a silent sword-wielding warrior.  Nyssa, one of the two assassins that fought blade in their warehouse, ends up becoming something of a potential love-interest for Blade, even though she was born a vampire.  But that angle is wisely not fully explored.  Now, while the overlord and the Blood Pack are villains, it’s Nomak that steals the show here.  Played by British pop-star Luke Goss, Nomak is not only as capable a fighter as Blade, but because he’s a Reaper, he’s even more of a threat.  Yet, as the movie progresses, we see Nomak as more of a victim than an outright bad guy, which makes him more tragic.

And that brings us to Blade Trinity, the final film in Wesley Snipes’ trilogy.  After the events of the second movie, Blade and Whistler end up back in the States doing what they do best, only this time they’re set up by the vampires when Blade kills a human that he mistook as a vampire.  Right from the start, we’ve got problems.  See, in the original film, Blade told Karen that he knew how to spot vampires from the way they moved and the way they smelled.  How could he not tell the difference here, considering his senses are leagues beyond what humans have?  Not only that, they kill off Kris Kristofferson’s character…again, only to bring in the character’s daughter, who was born out of wedlock.  The connections to the original film are flimsy at best right from the start.  Bringing in Dracula as a villain was actually a really smart move, as it feels like a natural progression in terms of enemies that Blade has to face.  The film basically lays out that Dracula’s origins are shrouded in mystery, dating back over 6,000 years, and being the first of the vampire race.  Not bad, I could go with that, if the film did anything worthwhile with him.  Instead, he’s relegated to being just another henchman.  You don’t fucking do that with Dracula.  Dracula is THE vampire, and the film takes its focus off that confrontation with Blade by giving us side-characters that we don’t care about.  Jessica Biel does what she can with material she was given as Abigail, but Ryan Reynolds was simply obnoxious as Hannibal King.  WWE star Triple HHH is not a screen actor.  He’s awful, and Parker Posey’s character is a shrill little banshee that might as well be wearing a mustache.  The only actor to carry his weight as a villain is Dominic Purcell, as Drake/Dracula.

The action in the first two movies are second to none.  The opening blood rave sequence that introduces us to Blade is iconic.  It shows us how bad-ass he is and how much of a threat he poses to other vampires.  He can clear a room single-handedly.  The pacing of the film is also pretty fast, with some decent set-pieces that lead us to Blade’s final confrontation with Deacon Frost, which is one of the greatest finales in modern action cinema.  By bringing in Donnie Yen in the second film, you have that added flair of the Hong Kong cinema to a certain extent.  Yen not only plays Snowman, but he’s also one of the martial arts choreographers aside from Wesley Snipes and HIS stunt double.  The fights are less flashy and more grounded in a street-fighting style which adds to the brutal nature of action sequences.  The opening action sequence in Blade II is another strong introduction to the character.  Then the movie ups the ante with another spectacular sword-fight in the warehouse with the two assassins, wonky CGI aside.  Then it just gets crazier as the movie goes which culminates in the final battle between Blade and Nomak.  The action in the first two movies was spectacular.  Again, Blade Trinity drops the ball with the action.  The fight choreography is just…BAD.  It lacks the hard-hitting edge of the first two movies.  Also, this movie doesn’t really have a standout fight sequence like the blood rave from the first movie or the fight between Blade and Reinhardt’s henchmen.  No.  The fights lack the emotional heft that drove the fights in the first two movies.  The only standout here is Wesley Snipes, because he knows exactly what he’s doing.  I don’t think anybody else did, and the overreliance on CG is painfully obvious.

Ultimately, Blade Trinity was a real mess.  It’s come to light over the past several years that there were some serious problems between Wesley Snipes and the film’s writer/director, David S. Goyer.  Word is, is that it got physical between the two at one point and Snipes would only communicate with Goyer via sticky notes.  I don’t know how true all that is, but what you see on screen is the result of really bad decision-making in terms of writing and directing.  Yet, for all the film’s problems, I still found it be a good deal of fun.  It’s not in the upper-pantheon of action films, but it’s far from the worst.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a great movie, and even worse sequel.  The trilogy deserved an ending better than this, and I wish that Dracula had been treated a hell of a lot better than he had.  The fact that the movie’s still kind of fun speaks volumes about how dedicated most of the cast and crew were about making the movie, and THAT comes across on screen, which is a good thing, and the fact that it doesn’t ruin the first two is a miracle in and of itself.  If you decide to skip this one, you’re not missing much.  The first two movies are action masterpieces.  Trinity is just…odd.

Yeah, the Blade trilogy didn’t exactly end with a bang, but these movies are still worth watching today.  Honestly, I hope that Marvel and Kevin Feige can do the character justice.  It’s the one Marvel movie, aside from Deadpool 3, that I’m interested in right now.  So, those are my thoughts on the Blade trilogy.  2 out 3 ain’t bad, and those two still hold up 20 years later.  That’s pretty damned good, in my opinion.

Marvel Studios just can’t seem to get out of their own way, can they?  According to Variety, there seems to be a crisis or three happening over at Marvel/Disney.  I found out about some of this stuff via X/Twitter, but it just seems to me that the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.  Before I really get into what I think about the state of Marvel right now, I want to say that I’ve been a huge fan of the MCU since Iron Man came out back in 2008.  If it wasn’t for that movie’s success, we wouldn’t have the MCU.  We simply wouldn’t.  But thanks to director Jon Favreau and star Robert Downey, Jr., Iron Man launched what is considered to be the most successful film franchise in cinematic history.  Why was it so successful?  Solid writing, direction, and casting under the watchful eye of one Kevin Feige, who produced the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  Also, when The Avengers hit theaters in 2012, we knew exactly where the MCU was headed with Thanos.  While not every film in the MCU leading up to Infinity War and Endgame were great, they were still financially successful, which meant that audiences were connected.  After Endgame?  Everything started falling apart.  Phase IV of the MCU had a very rocky start with the Black Widow film which was released on Disney Plus at the same time it was released in theaters.  The pandemic was in full swing at this point, so it wasn’t necessarily unexpected that Black Widow wouldn’t garner the kind of money that the previous films would.  But the problem was that Black Widow, in terms of narrative structure, should’ve been made and released before Infinity War.  Why?  Because the title character dies in Avengers: Endgame.  Since I’m in the mood for spoiling things if you haven’t seen it, too bad, Tony Stark also dies in Endgame, but his and Black Widow’s ends were narratively appropriate for the story they were telling.

So, why did I bring that up?  Well, it seems that there’s been talk over at Marvel about bringing back the main roster of the Avengers: Hulk, Black Widow, Captain America, Hawkeye, and Iron Man, even though two of them were dead.  But in the MCU, there seems to be no such thing as permadeath.  My first thought to this was…why?  You had an excellent conclusion to ten years worth of story-telling.  I’ll tell you why they’re thinking about this: They’re desperate.  Phase IV didn’t pan out like they thought it would.  You had a number of movies that were so disconnected from each other, you had no idea where the MCU was heading.  It wasn’t clear until Marvel announced The Multiverse Saga.  I don’t think the announcement had the effect that they were going for.  As some astute YouTubers like John Campea had pointed out, something like this ran the risk of being too bloated and convoluted for its own good.  Given the mixed reactions to Marvel’s Phase IV projects which includes the Disney Plus shows, people just weren’t as connected to the MCU as they had been during the Infinity Saga.  The shows garnered a number of mixed and negative reviews.  Also the reactions to the last couple of films like Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania sent a shockwave through Marvel.  It’s not just the hubris of Disney’s higher-ups that are at fault here, but it’s a huge part of it.  On top of all that, one of the newcomers to the MCU, Jonathan Majors, is embroiled in a legal battle dealing with accusations of domestic abuse.  The character that he plays in the MCU, Kang the Conqueror was built around him, but now sources are saying that Marvel’s kind of screwed because of this situation.  All they need to do is recast the character.  Problem solved.

Because of the situation with Majors, talk has emerged of Marvel swing the MCU away from Kang as the main villain and putting Dr. Doom in his place.  Such a shift carries a lot of headaches on its own, but it’s really hard to see Marvel having much of a choice, especially if Majors is convicted.  There’s also the strikes and the issues surrounding Marvel’s VFX teams being worked to the bone.  There’s a lot of stuff that Disney and Marvel has been dealing with.  Recently, it’s been reported that Oscar-winner Mahershala Ali, who is currently attached to Marvel’s upcoming Blade film, was considering leaving the project due to lousy scripts, going through 5 writers and two directors.  Because of that, Feige himself got involved and hired an Oscar-winning writer, Michael Green, to pen the film.  Green is known for writing the outstanding Logan.  I haven’t seen anything from the MCU since Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.  If there’s a movie that could possible get me interested in giving the MCU another shot, it’s Blade.  I’m a huge fan of the Wesley Snipes movies and the character is simply awesome in every aspect.  So, with the actor’s strike HOPEFULLY coming to an end this week, I want to see Blade being made, because if we’re being honest: Ali’s not getting any younger, but I think he would make an excellent Blade.  I really do.  He’s an amazing talent, and it would be STUPID of Marvel to waste the opportunity for him to be in a movie like Blade.  From what I understand, the movie is also reported to have a budget of less than a 100 million dollars, which is great.  You don’t need a quarter of a billion dollars to deliver a solid action movie.

Marvel has a chance of coming back from these issues with an upcoming slate of superheroes that Disney’s acquired from Fox when they bought the studio.  X-Men and the Fantastic Four are the biggest and most anticipated superhero groups that people want to see in the MCU.  Deadpool 3 is set to resume production next year, assuming that the actors’ strike ends this week, so I’m looking forward to that.  Since Bob Iger returned to Disney, he’s been forcing a change of direction with Marvel’s stuff.  And say what you will about how Iger has been responding to the strikes, he’s been really good at letting the creatives do their thing, something that Bob Chapek had no intention of doing.  Marvel got themselves into this situation, but I think they can get themselves out of it, and come out stronger than ever, even if it means making serious changes to the direction that the MCU is heading.  If they can, I will be in line to see Blade and Deadpool 3.  Time will tell.  Until then, Marvel needs to lay off the sauce and get some counseling.

Here are again, ladies and gents.  More physical media goodness.  Yesterday, I made post on how physical media isn’t dying, it’s just going back to being a niche market the way it used to be in the 70s and 80s.  While most youngsters are fine with online streaming, collectors like me aren’t.  WE MUST HAVE PHYSICAL MEDIA!  PHYSICAL MEDIA IS LIFE!  In all seriousness, and I keep saying this, collecting physical media isn’t just about having the movie in case the internet goes out, it’s a matter of film preservation, because most streaming services just aren’t going to be keeping stuff on their services if nobody’s watching.  It’s an even worse situation for older movies from the early 20th century.  A lot of these movies just haven’t been moved over to the digital realm because the studios don’t see the monetary value in doing so.  But people like me see otherwise.  There’s value in those older movies.  Not monetary, but culturally.  The way we make movies today is vastly different from how they made them back then.  Those older films are a window into an era that no longer exists.  But it’s always important to keep an eye on the past while looking to the future.  That said, I got a bunch of crap this month, so let’s take a look.

Winnie The Pooh: Blood and Honey – Scream Factory

A Florida fourth grade teach was accused of showing their students Winnie The Pooh: Blood and Honey.  Parents were outraged.  Why?  Winnie The Pooh: Blood and Honey is a horror movie.  That’s right.  It’s a gory slasher movie.  Ignoring the hilariousness of the situation in that news report, Winnie The Pooh: Blood and Honey was made only because the characters of Winnie the Pooh and Piglet were in the public domain, which means anybody could do anything they want with the characters as long as it didn’t infringe on previous copyrighted material.  So…the film-makers opted for a slasher movie.  Christopher Robin grew up and left Pooh and Piglet behind to become a doctor.  The animals of 100 Acres didn’t like that and reverted to their animalistic ways and became blood-thirsty killers.  Is this a good movie?  No.  But it’s absolutely my kind of bad.  Look, I don’t have the emotional connection to these characters the way a lot of people do.  So, it didn’t offend me when Pooh turned into a murdering psychopath.  The use of CGI blood is questionable, but the movie was made for less than 50,000 GBP(British Pounds), but it made more than 5 million dollars.  It’s a success.  So, of course they’re going to make a sequel with a larger budget.  I’m strangely looking forward to it.

The Abomination – Visual Vengeance

Speaking of gory, we also have a micro-budget shot on video horror movie called The Abomination from 1986.  Yes, shot on video.  Which means the picture is of VHS quality.  On one hand, it’s kind of ugly, but at the same time there’s something charming about that kind of visual.  There were a lot of these kinds of movies that were shot on video back in the day.  The film-makers simply couldn’t afford the kind of equipment that you need to make the movie look professional.  So, it IS guerilla-style film-making.  The Abomination is a hoot and a holler.  It’s about a guy who discovers that his mother had a tumor that grows and requires human flesh to survive.  It’s gory.  The acting’s awful, and again, the picture quality is terrible, but that’s part of the experience.  What doesn’t suck are the effects.  It’s all done practically.  Also, look at the special features and what the disc comes with.  This is one of the best disc releases I’ve seen this year, and it’s for a movie that 90 percent of the audience hasn’t even heard of.  It comes with a comic-book adaptation of itself.

The Exorcist – Warner Bros.

It’s The Exorcist.  What more do I need to say?  It’s one of the greatest horror movies of all time.  If you’re a horror fanatic, you should already own this.

The Exorcist III – Scream Factory

Of all the Exorcist sequels, this one is what many consider to be the best, and it wasn’t even originally supposed to be a sequel.  WB wanted an actual sequel that wasn’t The Heretic, so the movie that William Peter Blatty tried to make had to go through some reshoots and ended up being cut to make more of a connection to the original film.  This set from Scream Factory includes two versions of the film: The theatrical cut and Legion, the original version that Blatty wanted to put on screen.  It’s a vastly different kind of movie than what WB wanted.  Legion is a far more character-oriented version of the film that focuses more on the relationship between George C. Scott’s character and Brad Dourif’s Gemini Killer.  It’s a solid entry regardless of which version you watch.

Halloween Ends – Universal Pictures

I know that in my review of this movie, that I wasn’t as impressed with it as I was with the first two movies in David Gordon Green’s trilogy.  That said, I’m the kind of guy that’s willing to give movies a second chance, and I’m glad I did, because NOW I get what DGG was trying to go for with this one.  I don’t necessarily think he succeeded completely, but the idea of a traumatic event that can cause people to do things that they would normally never do.  The film’s opening is still a bit of a shocker, but the overall movie is better than I initially gave it credit for.

The Conjuring Universe 7-Film Collection – Warner Bros.

Of all the movies that were inspired by The Exorcist, I consider The Conjuring to be one of them.  Now, I bought the collection because I hadn’t seen any of them before, so I started with the original movie.  Outstanding.  I’ve yet to watch the others, but I’m sure I’ll get a kick out of them.  This set has no special features, and has two movies per disc, but the picture quality for the standard DVD isn’t bad.

Prey – 20th Century Studios

This is the 5th film in the Predator in the series, and it’s the best one since the original.  It’s a prequel that takes place in the early 18th century, so it gets to take things in a different direction, and Dan Trachtenberg does a phenomenal job.  Amber Midthunder is a revelation in this film, as the film focuses on the Comanche people.  It works incredibly well, and the creature itself is still an intimidating presence.  What makes this home video release interesting, is that Prey went straight to Hulu, a streaming service instead of theaters.  Understandable, considering how lame the previous film was.  Most of us had no reason to expect Disney to release this movie on physical media.  They had it on Hulu, so why the physical release?  Streaming isn’t as profitable as Disney had hoped, and people really wanted a physical copy.  What’s great, is that this disc also includes the Comanche dub for the film, which gives the film more authenticity. It’s fantastic.

The Maltese Falcon – Warner Bros.

The Maltese Falcon is one of the great noir films of the 40s.  It is an absolute classic with Humphrey Bogard, Mary Astor,  and Peter Lorre.  The McGuffin of the film is this golden bird that everybody seems to be interested in, but the actual story involves private investigator Sam Spade as he investigates the murder of his partner, and gets wrapped up in this wild goose chase.  The dialogue, the performances, and the ending are pure gold.  There’s a reason why I love movies from these era and The Maltese Falcon is a perfect example.  It’s THE noir film that really made the genre popular.

Transformers: Rise of the Beasts

I’ll be completely forthcoming: I love the Michael Bay Transformers movies.  Except for Revenge of the Fallen.  That one can go die in a fire.  But the rest of them are a lot of fun.  I got a real kick out of The Last Knight, despite it not making a lick of sense.  But that opening battle in medieval times was EPIC.  The movie was absolutely silly and it was clear that Anthony Hopkins was having fun with it.  But the film was the first movie in the franchise to actually flop.  So, Paramount went back to the drawing board and we ended up with Bumblebee which was a wild movie featuring everybody’s favorite Autobot.  Now we have Rise of the Beasts which finally brings Unicron into the picture in all his enormous glory.  The movie includes two different eras of Transformers: The Gen 1 Autobots and the Maximals from the Beast Wars cartoon.  It’s also under 2 hours long, so it feels more stream-lined.  It’s actually one of my favorites of the franchise, and its set in the 90s.  It’s a ton of fun, and it made enough money at the box office to get at least one more movie.  It needs one more movie because the whole Unicron angle needs to be explored.

And those were the movies that I bought since the last time I did this.  So, yeah, I picked up some interesting stuff.  Next week’s going to see the release of Barbie and The Last Voyage of the Demeter, so you can bet your ass I’ll be getting those.  There’s also some other surprising stuff coming out that I’m interested, so I’ll let y’all know when I get that stuff.  So…until next time!

 

 

 

 

I want to talk about the state of physical media right now.  By physical media, I mean DVD/Blu-Ray/4K UHD.  I also want to talk about why physical media isn’t dying.  I’ve been seeing a lot of pundits on YouTube crying about the “death of physical media.”  Here’s a statistic for you, and this comes from The NPD Group, a research company as of May of 2023: Physical media is still generating $1.34 billion dollars annually in the United States alone.  You know what means?  People are still buying physical media.  Now, here’s another statistic: According to Media Play News, total disc sales dropped 22.72 percent from last year during the last week of September.  So, why the discrepancy?  Well, the fact of the matter is that the market has changed.  With the dawn of the streaming age, people are subscribing more to streaming services which offers a massive ton of content for a steady price.  Whereas, with physical media, people have to shell out for each copy of the film or TV show.  As streaming has become more prevalent, physical media has begun seeing a decline.  In fact, physical media has been seeing a decline of at least 25 percent each year, which is around 20-23 million.  These are the facts.

What is also a fact is that streaming hasn’t been as profitable for major studios as they’d had hoped.  There are only so many households on the planet that you can reach, and if you somehow reach them all, your revenue stream will hit a plateau, where you won’t be making anymore money.  A lot of streamers now are offering tiers of service that include ads.  But that’s not enough, and we’re seeing movie studios just drop content from their services if they don’t bring in enough subscriptions.  That’s the only way these services make money.  Netflix’s entire revenue structure is based around its streaming content.  Companies like Amazon and Apple can afford to do streaming because that’s not their core service or industry.  It’s just another revenue stream.    The reason I bring all this up is because earlier this week, it was announced through Variety and other trades that Best Buy was going to pull all of its physical media out their stores next year.  They’ll still be selling video games, though.  Movies and TV show? Not so much.  When this hit the interwebs, everybody was crying wolf, saying this heralded the end of physical media.  No.  If anything it’s heralding the end of Best Buy, which has become nothing more than a glorified phone kiosk which also happens to sell appliances, TVs, and computers.  That’s it.  If you’ve been in a Best Buy over the past 5 or so years, you have seen their movie selection shrink from AISLES of titles to one set of shelves and a couple of displays.

Best Buy really isn’t doing well.  Their revenue has been decreasing year after year.  I honestly don’t expect them to survive another decade.  I really don’t.  Target is also removing physical media from some of its store, because they aren’t generating enough to make it worth stocking and displaying them.  The reason for that is that the audience is different.  Younger audiences aren’t as interested in collecting physical media as the rest of us.  BUT:  There’s reason to hope.  There are still brick and mortar stores like Walmart that will continue to stock physical media. Boutique labels like Shout Factory, Criterion and Kino Lorber are picking up the slack.  There are also online retailers that specifically deal in physical media like DiabolikDVD and Gruv.  I’ll post links at the end.  Physical media isn’t dying.  It’s shrinking.  It’s going back to the niche market that it used to be in the 70s and 80s with VHS and Betamax.  Physical media didn’t really explode until Tremors hit the shelves in 1990.  Then it took off.  When DVD entered the picture in 1997/98, it was all the rage.  Same thing with Blu-Ray.  The way audiences have consumed media has evolved over the last 40 years.  But studios like Disney are starting to realize that they can’t just dismiss physical media out of hand, because the money they get from those sales is not insignificant.

That brings up another issue:  What happens when optical disc players are no longer being manufactured?  We’ve seen multiple companies exit the optical player industry.  But there are still companies out there that still build these things, even if it is at a loss.  Sony has their PlayStation 5 which is also a 4K player.  Same deal with the Xbox Series X, although, Xbox just introduced a refreshed system that doesn’t have an optical drive.  PS5 is also getting a “slimmer” version, but it does give the consumer the option of having the optical drive or not.  Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that all these companies decide not to build anymore of these players?  What happens then?  Well, someone on YouTube, I forget who, said that some of these boutique labels would be willing to pick up the slack, by manufacturing their own.  Physical media is going to be around for quite a while.  Yeah, most brick and mortar stores are getting out of that, but most people these days are buying stuff online anyway, whether it’s through Amazon or Walmart.  THAT’S where physical media’s going.  It’s going to be for those of us that really do care about preserving movies in any format.  There’s a lot of us collectors out there that are willing to pay good money for quality products.  It’s just good business.  Make US happy, we make YOU happy.  So, NO, physical media ISN’T dying.  It’s slowing down, but if I’m being honest, there are more movies being announced for Blu-Ray/DVD/4K then there have been in the past year or so.  There’s STILL a market for this stuff, you just have to look.  You wanna know something that’s really funny?  Of the three formats, basic DVD is outselling Blu-Ray AND 4K combined.  I still buy some movies on standard DVD.  So, don’t believe the hype that physical media’s going away anytime soon.  It’s not.  The market is simply changing as per the technology.  Honestly, if these big-ass studios continue to erase content that people watch from their services, audiences will leave those services.  If anything, I expect physical media to make a pretty big comeback in the next year or so.  I’ve got no evidence on that, it’s just a gut feeling.

I almost forgot: Here are some links to various boutique labels and online retailers aside from Amazon and Walmart that you should check out:

DiabolikDVD
Gruv
Deep Discount
Synapse Films
Shout Factory
Criterion
Kino Lorber
MVD