Physical Media Matters More Than Ever

No one expects a corporation to walk into their living room and start taking things off the shelves. Of course, when it comes to movies and TV shows in the streaming age, you don’t have to.

For the second time in just three years, Sony has announced plans to remove scads of titles purchased using the digital PlayStation store. In September, 500 StudioCanal projects will disappear from customers’ libraries in the UK and parts of Europe thanks to an expiring licensing agreement.

Sony previously reversed course after making a similar move involving American consumers and hundreds of Discovery titles in 2023, and while it’s still possible this latest controversy could end the same way, backlash has been significant. The news was particularly seismic for gamers, who are being forced simultaneously to reckon with the gradual disappearance of physical PlayStation discs, which Sony said it will stop producing for new games in early 2028.

What’s been striking, though, is just how forcefully film and television lovers have reacted to the shift as well. The outrage isn’t about losing access to convenient entertainment, but a growing sense that the media people thought they owned is now subject to the same instability governing much of modern life.

Not long ago, we found ourselves stuck at home during the pandemic, relying on books, films, TV shows, music, and video games to remind us that life extended beyond our four walls. But these days, it increasingly feels as though many audiences are quietly preparing for a different kind of apocalypse.

Stuck in a global marketplace where permanence itself has become hard to trust, today’s bunker isn’t just stocked with canned food and toilet paper. It’s also lined with stories about the existential storms humanity has weathered before — in turn, teaching us how to survive the next one.

Viewed through that lens, physical media ownership in 2026 isn’t about monetized nostalgia or even the attention economy. It’s an act of consumer self-defense and a vote of no confidence in a purchasing landscape that asks people to keep paying for access while denying them the comfort of certainty. 

‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ (1981) ©Paramount/Courtesy Everett Collection

For most of modern history, the economic marketplace doubled as a decency metric. Every transaction reinforced a simple social contract: You did your job, someone else did theirs, and money changed hands. After that, the exchange was finished. Complete. Kaput. Over. Forever. 

A farmer might trade potatoes for a tailor’s new clothes, and a mechanic might fix a transmission for cold, hard cash. But whether the transaction itself was between private citizens or institutions, society functioned because we continuously demonstrated our value to one another — without demanding an indefinite partnership.

The right to take your money elsewhere? That was freedom. And over time, ownership became the everyday consumer’s emotional reward for participating in a system that was always changing.

For many in the U.S., the American Dream is a belief in the idea that delayed gratification and hard work can still pay off over generations. But people still need something to keep them going, and making a purchase holds the power to transform someone’s labor, and even their life’s memory, into a tangible symbol of progress that can’t be taken away. At least, theoretically.

‘The Stepford Wives’ (2004)©Paramount/Courtesy Everett Collection

Whether you were buying your dream house — or a special DVD collector’s edition of Hugh Laurie’s “House” — the point wasn’t possessions. It was the reassuring sense that promises had been kept and that, when a deal was done, it had stayed that way. The streaming economy didn’t invent licensing agreements in Hollywood, but it did spend the better part of a decade making the impermanence of modern media much harder for household audiences to ignore.

During the height of the Streaming Wars, the industry landscape was uniquely legible for average consumers. Each month brought tidy lists of what was coming and going from Netflix, Hulu, Prime Video, HBO Max, and other major platforms. Movies and TV shows departed services, but they typically resurfaced elsewhere. And the spaces they left behind in various catalogs were almost always filled with new arrivals — many of them exciting streaming originals.

At that time, subscribers saw abundance, not absence, and many happily traded their cable bill for a growing stack of subscriptions because the bargain still felt obvious. But permanent ownership became substantially more important when that access stopped feeling reliable, and the gaps in that patchwork agreement grew too large for most film and TV lovers to ignore.

How David Zaslav Made Discs Look Essential Again 

As entertainment splintered across an ever-expanding web of premium rentals, ad-supported channels, subscription services, and monthly bundles, audiences found themselves objectively wasting more money each month — while growing less certain they would be able to watch what they cared about.

The most frustrating searches weren’t for new blockbusters or buzzy prestige TV shows — they were for smaller and stranger projects that, by their very nature, seemed uniquely vulnerable to disappearing from the internet altogether. Enter David Zaslav. The Warner Bros. Discovery CEO didn’t design Hollywood’s economy, but his aggressive moves within it did reshape what many executives thought was possible.  

For decades, major studios generally behaved as though building a large content library was proof of a solid entertainment brand. A film or TV series might stop generating meaningful revenue on a weekly basis, but it almost always retained value as part of the company’s legacy. The digital era altered that equation, effectively turning the hosting of old media into a charitable act at the corporate level. 

Ongoing expenses, including server costs, residual obligations, and, yes, licensing considerations, made the whole of Hollywood history harder to manage and, by extension, it was seen as less marketable to some. Following the birth of Zaslav’s Warner Bros. Discovery, that tension was evident to customers.

‘Westworld’ (1973)Courtesy Everett Collection

Max originals and even HBO’s own series “Westworld” disappeared from the service, while completed theatrical films like “Batgirl” were shelved before release. Even a finished DC superhero movie wasn’t guaranteed to reach audiences as works of art became tax write-offs, and entire catalogs were openly evaluated through a cost-benefit analysis that too often seemed to place their cultural importance last.

The realization that some titles were worth more if they effectively didn’t exist changed everything. Before Zaslav, many people understood streaming libraries as permanent archives. Since then, they’ve come to resemble temporary inventories capable of hiding decisions that real people find heartbreaking.

That’s when physical media curation stopped looking like a hobby for obsessive enthusiasts and more like emotional insurance. People don’t buy generators because they enjoy storing gasoline in the garage. They buy them because they don’t trust the power grid to hold up during a hurricane.

Blu-rays, DVD box sets, VHS tapes, and other independent copies of old media increasingly express that same instinct. In 2026, not all physical media collectors are rejecting streaming’s convenience or even its rising cost. Rather, they’re hedging against an evolving marketplace that has made stability feel scarce. 

That Time Streaming Preservation Got Very Personal

It’s worth remembering that, not long ago, those same cinephiles were often dismissed as sentimental cranks clinging to obsolete technology. Sure, boutique labels, like the Criterion Collection, Arrow Video, Vinegar Syndrome, and Severin Films, have spent years catering to devoted cinephiles who genuinely appreciate their superior transfers, in-depth commentary, and special packaging.

But more broadly, as streaming became the dominant way audiences consume entertainment, a shelf full of stuff started to look like a relic of a clumsier time that most folks were happy to forget. When titles started disappearing from their digital collections, however, those dusty stacks reemerged as both a critical contingency plan and material proof that the media business was changing.

Perhaps no saga illustrates that transformation better than “Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies.” If you know me personally, there’s a good chance I’ve ranted to you about the canceled Paramount+ series numerous times before. It’s not a masterpiece, but it remains one of the streaming era’s most remarkable examples of widespread artistic betrayal — later semi-repaired through physical disc production. 

‘Grease 2’ (1982)©Paramount/Courtesy Everett Collection

Shortly after the musical prequel series premiered on streaming in 2023, “Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies” was canceled and removed from Paramount+ as part of a corporate cost-cutting initiative. The embarrassing display was especially difficult for the scores of young performers who had been at the show’s lavish world premiere in Los Angeles just weeks before and who had considered the project their big break. (Ironically, the production was explicitly promoted as an opportunity to tell stories that Hollywood previously couldn’t because they involved disenfranchised groups in the 1950s.)

A posthumous DVD release eventually became the only dependable way to revisit the series, and although it was barely given the chance to find its audience, “Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies” secured its place in streaming history — not as an emblem of artistic entitlement but as a reminder that major film and TV events can be functionally removed from the public’s memory in the digital age. 

FYC: Hollywood History Shouldn’t Become a Highlight Reel

Physical media didn’t merely commemorate that show’s existence — it rescued it. And that’s a vital distinction in a culture that, until very recently, made such steps seem broadly unnecessary. In fact, one of the stranger artifacts to emerge from the turbulent streaming era wasn’t designed for consumers at all. It was actually made for awards voters and meant to be destroyed. 

For years, studios have distributed physical “For Your Consideration” screeners to critics and voters during awards season. Those discs are intended to forward high-profile promotional campaigns, not to preserve rare pieces of modern media. But they’ve nevertheless come to serve as a key survival mechanism for obscure streaming originals — and even some controversial theatrical releases.

‘Waterworld’ (1995)ph: Ben Glass

Take Louis C.K.’s still-unreleased “I Love You, Daddy” from 2017. Premiered at that year’s Toronto International Film Festival, the filmmaker and stand-up comedian’s bizarre dramedy had its distribution canceled amid multiple sexual misconduct allegations. But that scandal hit only after FYC screeners had already been mailed out to press and awards voters alike.

Today, those specific discs serve as an accidental record of a pivotal moment in Hollywood, and whether their narrative content ever deserves the public’s attention again is arguably beside the point. It’s important to remember that preservation isn’t the same thing as a cultural endorsement, and sometimes the hardest titles to find reveal something ugly about the world that produced them.

Those copies of “I Love You, Daddy” aren’t precursors to the comeback C.K. is now enjoying on Netflix a decade later. They demonstrate where one of the industry’s biggest talents stood right before the #MeToo movement altered his career forever. They also show how the industry responded in real time.

The companies leading today’s physical media revival are going beyond selling products to establish thorough and complex artistic records that we would all be worse without. As part of that process, repertory film and TV labels can commission important interviews, essays, and more archival materials that explain both why certain projects matter and how they came to exist in the first place.

Every “new” old release is an opportunity for an editorial argument that a story deserves further discussion, and that’s one of the primary reasons IndieWire publishes a physical media column every month. It’s also why yours truly makes cult film recommendations each week, establishing my beloved IndieWire After Dark canon — which explores some media that’s good and more that’s astonishingly bad.

‘Shaft’ (1971)Courtesy Everett Collection

These throwback initiatives create new opportunities for audiences and experts to connect beyond the first-run calendar, and in that sense, retro media helps foster humanity’s continued self-reflection. 

Archives aren’t valuable because they stop our achievements from aging. They’re valuable because they preserve evidence — of creative breakthroughs, commercial missteps, abandoned experiments, ethical failures, and more. If only Hollywood’s victories survive, history starts resembling propaganda fast.

Entertainment has always been shaped as much by what’s available to viewers as by what’s being actively celebrated. That’s why independent collections, like Seattle’s Scarecrow Video and Vidiots in Los Angeles, have become so crucial. Their missions have evolved to include housing a physical stockpile of film and TV that the digital world is no longer incentivizing studios or streamers to protect.

The Stories We’re Likely to Lose, Even Doing Our Best

As Hollywood has grown more focused on maximizing profit margins than in stewarding its history, physical media labels, repertory programmers, academic libraries, microcinemas, and indie exhibitors have inherited the work of defending a shared past no corporation can be trusted to preserve alone.

Louis C.K.’s “I Love You Daddy” still exists today, even though, strictly speaking, you are supposed to break FYC screeners once you’ve watched them. But many of those discs eventually found their way into secondhand shops and estate sales where private collectors scooped them up for safekeeping.

It’s a fascinating example of a loophole that demonstrates the frankly inspiring lengths some will go to resist erasure in the digital age. But it also raises a troubling question: What happens to the films and TV shows that never get a physical release of any kind?

‘Tuca and Bertie’

Not even 20 years ago, mainstream entertainment followed a remarkably predictable life cycle. A movie would leave theaters, then move to cable, then arrive on VHS or DVD, and finally find its way to a used-media store or a public library. Hollywood wasn’t expected to shepherd every moment in pop culture forever — because ownership naturally became decentralized over time. That allowed future audiences to rediscover, reinterpret, and even rehabilitate entire cinematic concepts on their own terms.

Streaming originals don’t always enjoy that luxury. Hundreds of stories released straight to consumers in recent years appear permanently tethered to the companies that commissioned them. If those companies lose interest in preserving that work (Netflix is the real platform to watch, in that regard), audiences might never find another copy — period. 

Two Slogans, One Crisis of Trust

The physical media movement didn’t begin as a consumer-rights campaign. Long before Hollywood’s recent wave of removals, collectors had been repeating the same phrase for years: Physical Media Matters. You’ll find it on stickers, buttons, T-shirts, YouTube channels, Reddit threads, niche home video sites, and more. 

At first, the slogan was seen as a rallying cry for dorks with expendable income. Shiny and optimistic, the position wasn’t political. It simply reflected a belief that cinema deserved to exist beyond a desktop file. Then, the reality of Hollywood changed around it.

As streaming became more turbulent, and studios repeatedly let down both their creators and customers, Physical Media Matters evolved from a hobbyist’s mantra into an industry-wide assertion that private ownership was now an act of public preservation.

‘Hook’©TriStar Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection

The internet produced a very different slogan around the same time: If buying isn’t owning, then piracy isn’t stealing. That phrase emerged from video game communities who have been frustrated by disappearing purchases, digital storefronts, server shutdowns, and software licenses that resemble rentals for a long, long time. 

It’s a far more aggressive (read: legally dubious) stance than Physical Media Matters, but it isn’t a celebration of theft either. It’s an accusation that the marketplace has broken its side of the bargain — and culturally, both mottos are answering the same philosophical question: What happens when people stop trusting the institutions responsible for preserving the art they’ve already paid to support?

There’s no reliable way to measure how many people in the gaming, film, or TV worlds are actively embracing private torrent archives, but online conversation increasingly frames the illegal practice as a practical solution. For now, the industry ought to consider itself lucky that Physical Media Matters seems to remain the dominant response.

People are still buying movies, and interest in repertory cinema has never felt more vibrant. But if audiences choose to keep building up their personal collections through legitimate means instead of the black market, that will be their choice. And Hollywood should be careful not to convince them otherwise.