Would you pay $100 for a movie? Criterion and the 'second golden age' of physical media

Walking through this year's Toronto International Film Festival, there was a peculiar star bringing in the crowds. A draw that built a line blocks down the street, four days straight, seeing fans occasionally waiting three or more hours for an interaction that lasted three minutes or less.

It wasn't Timothée Chalamet, Jacob Elordi or Scarlet Johannsen. It was a dusty white van full of old DVDs.

"I promise you there will be friends made in this line today," Peter Becker, president of the video distribution and restoration company Criterion Collection, said over the excited chatter of the crowd.

"We've had film clubs formed. We've had people get engaged… although they knew each other before they arrived. Thank goodness."

To be fair, the Criterion Mobile Closet has more than DVDs. It also stocks Blu-ray and 4K UHD films, from this year's best picture-winner Anora as far back as 1921's The Kid — with the largest concentration bunching up in the 1960s.

The van, as the name suggests, is the mobile version of the "Criterion Closet." That cramped storage space in the brand's Manhattan office is the site of its wildly popular "Criterion Closet Picks" video series. In it, stars from Michael Cera to Willem Dafoe simply walk in, select their favourite movies, and walk out.

It's a vicarious window-shopping experience that draws millions of views, promotes the Criterion streaming service, and even shapes cultural conversations. (Ben Affleck's good-natured mocking of seeing his Armageddon included in the collection somewhat set the internet on fire earlier this year.)

All of this has helped push Criterion into a rarefied cultural space; and made it one of a handful of boutique labels contributing to a come-back for DVDs and other physical media.

Labels like Criterion, Vinegar Syndrome, Shout!, Arrow and Janus Films release new high-end packages of often older movies. (Second Sight's luxury edition of The Nice Guys is going for north of $100; Vinegar Syndrome's deluxe edition of the obscure oddity The Keep completely sold out when priced over $70; and Criterion's new Wes Anderson box set has a pre-order sale price of $400). That let's them wring out profit from films that are less expensive to acquire than big-budget fare.

It's a strategy that's allowed collectors to fuel a "second golden age for physical media," said David Marriott, co-founder of the distributor Canadian International Pictures.

"A Marvel movie's new Blu-ray isn't going to be the driving force for them. But if you love movies, if you are a dedicated cinephile… that is the backbone of this collector's marketplace," which, he said, has grown exponentially in the last five to seven years.

"And it's large enough and consistent enough and growing enough where it can support this panoply of labels that we see now."

Marriott credits the success largely to the labels' "anti-assembly line" mentality: individually commissioning artwork, commentary and extras for lesser-known movies — adding to the price, but also to the allure. That convinces customers to "blind buy" films they've never seen, simply on their faith in the brand and what its stamp of approval means.

That, says Jonathan Doyle, the company's other co-founder, is not the mentality behind big studios' limited physical media market today.

"They focus on releasing and re-releasing films that they know sell," he said. "Part of why it's a golden age [now] is because you're seeing films that have merit — but maybe not great commercial potential — still getting that attention as if they are commercial films."

That was an element Canadian filmmaker Jacob Medjuck encountered early in his career. After his 2008 film Summerhood, starring Joe Flaherty and John Cusack, won a series of festival awards, he was expecting at least some appetite from distribution companies.

But then the worst happened: Blockbuster imploded.

"For an independent, the DVD was the majority of your revenue. And studios would rely on that revenue when buying independent films," Medjuck said, noting that two-thirds of their expected sales came from discs — especially for Canadian films, which have always struggled to compete with their American counterparts at the box office.

"When that went away… studios stopped picking up independent films because we weren't getting a theatrical [release]... And without DVDs, there was no way to release it."

That helped lead to the media landscape we have now, he says: an unending slew of big-budget mega-sequels and franchised properties completely dwarfing middle-budget fare and straight comedies. Even with the advent of streaming, Medjuck says there hasn't been much of a course correction.

"To the best of my awareness, nothing has replaced DVDs," he said. "Nothing is safer, nothing was safer than DVDs."

Even with the rise of the boutique labels, there is trouble brewing: total revenue for DVDs and Blu-rays has plummeted since peaking in the late 2000s, said Cord Cutter News's Luke Bouma, dropping as much as 90 per cent.

That's scared manufacturers off. The boutique movie market needs deep-pocketed tech companies to craft the complicated 4K players and even the discs themselves. But businesses from LG, to Samsung to Pioneer have already exited the market — while Best Buy has announced its intention to stop carrying movies.

And yet, everyone spoken to for this story voiced the belief that boutique player companies will eventually sprout up to fill in the gap.

The passion movie lovers have for physical media is too great to imagine anything else, says filmmaker Eric Janvier, whose new film Last Stop Video Rental is all about the resurgent love for such stores. As proof, he recalls the people who showed up outside the Edmonton video store they filmed in. They would routinely bang on the glass, and ask loudly whether their trucks were actually movie trucks, terrified the store was closing.

"That really is why I made this movie," he said. "For people like that, [who] knock on that glass door and ask if we're shutting down for good."