I Used To Collect Movies Once

Why I’ve all but stopped buying films.

I’m one of Those People. You know the ones. I ogle your DVD collection when I visit your house, you quietly worry I’m judging you based on how organised it is and what it contains, and my own apartment has shelves upon shelves of films, organised not just alphabetically, but by category too.

Not the usual categories (action, drama, sci-fi, western) either — mine are sorted by ‘tone’, so that I pick a film dependent on my mood. ‘Comedy’ or ‘Drama’? No way. Too simple. I need a few subtle grades, thank-you-very-much.

My partner and I were the first people we knew to start buying Blu-rays en masse, too, and as it stands we have about a 60/40 Blu-ray to DVD ratio on our shelves.

Yet, in the past year or so, my partner and I have all but given up buying movies.

There’s a few reasons for this…

Firstly, because it’s no longer clear just how useful these discs will be in two years, five years or ten years. DVDs began to look awful the moment we got a fancy new HD TV some years back, and, of course, we had to start caring about the image quality and format we bought new films in. Blu-rays look nice, but as we move toward 2K and 4K TVs and much higher resolution media (some 2K & 4K content is already available on YouTube) I began to wonder just how useful Blu-rays will be. As it stands we have some SD and some HD content on our shelves. What if there were 2K discs in that mix too?

Secondly, because we keep moving to digital. We stopped buying boxed copies of TV series years ago. The reason was simple — a set-top box can remember what episodes we’re up to, and even how far through a given episode. Buying them on iTunes or some similar service is just so much easier for people who absorb a lot of media.

Thirdly, because film companies are doing their best to wage war against the consumer. Buy a film on disc? You get a ton of unskippable trailers on every second disc. Want those special features? They’re increasingly spread over multiple formats. I can’t just buy Star Trek Into Darkness on Blu-ray and get the commentary and featurettes I want any more — I have to buy multiple copies, and there’s just no way I’m going to do that.

So when a new film comes out that I absolutely must see, I stare morosely at the the numerous formats and video-on-demand / download services.

Even if I was committed to just giving up and spending my money on digital copies of films, who do I go with?

Now, I happen to mostly use Apple products. I use Macs for work and play, iPads and iPhones, Apple TVs… and so does my partner and so do most of my friends. So surely buying media from iTunes makes sense, right?

Well, no. I figure that just locks me further into a platform which I don’t want to be beholden to any more than I already am.

When I all but quit Google’s services in disgust, I began to realise how horrible it was being tied to a specific platform and how difficult it was to escape once you’re locked in. But now we increasingly have no choice.

It’s not the hardware that locks us in — it’s the data formats and the cloud services we choose to use.

The media I “own” on iTunes is not mine. If I bought a shiny new Blackberry Z10 or a new Lumia, getting all my legally-owned media onto my new device would be a nightmare.

And so, as a result, I have slowed down my media consumption.

Every time I watch a new film, I write a little one or two sentence review. I’ve done this for years. I can’t even remember what my original purpose was… but it does serve as an unintentionally useful way of gauging how much media I’m consuming.

Three years ago it was about 110 movies.

Two years ago, 78 movies.

This year, I’ve only seen 13 new films so far — and there’s only six or so weeks left in the year.

As I stare at the mess and at the boxes of mis-matched media discs gathering dust on my shelf. I think about the handful of films I “own” digitally across a handful of distribution platforms. I mull over the truly awful experience going to the cinema has become with 40 minutes of ads, stale popcorn, uncomfortable seats and no booze… and I wonder what the point is.

Maybe I should just give up.

I can just sigh and say calmly, “Yeah, I used to collect films. I used to be a movie nerd. But the film industry decided they didn’t want me any more.”