Physical blu-rays aren’t going anywhere, hell they aren’t going away in video game consoles despite doomsayers claiming otherwise — no shit Microsoft has the no sex box trying to push this every gen past the 360, but look at the PS5 slim with a DETACHABLE drive because of the shit sales of the digital only release.
Outside video james have been niche from their inception, most normal people think they’re obsolete like DVDs and never watched one. Many mainstream home video labels have given up when they realized this shit ain’t VHS tier, especially regional ones in other countries, but there’s plenty of good stuff still by Arrow, Eureka, Criterion et al if you don’t mind watching stuff in English, and their releases are still excellent.
Plus the niche side of the movie market isn’t as dumb as the FOMO cardboard garbage based videogame market anyway, sure there are some dumb releases sometimes but people are in to actually watch the shit they buy for the most part and there’s a pretty decent model going on for them: either just have it come out on a disc in a regular plastic case, or have a big dicked box jam packed with movies first, lobby cards later to make higher profile releases financially viable then sell those movies separately anyway. Check out how much good shit there is on the Bruce Lee at Golden Harvest box for example, it’s a far cry from the “One (1) classic 90s Arcade Game in a bare bones emulator but we include a lot of tacky cardboard shit that costed 69 cents inside this huge box, keep physical media alive, buy now” crap you see in video games. And Arrow just announced they’re going to release the movies separately recently so no loss if you didn’t want to buy the full thing.
Oh and don’t get me started on how movies declined sharply after streaming and covid anyway, most streaming exclusive shit is disposable as fuck lol.
variety.com
