Dent's backup for hellpocalypse

If you’re reading this in 2016, that most likely means you grew up in a world where there was a basic assumption that any movie or TV you wanted to watch would be reasonably available to you, thanks to the dual waves of VHS and then DVD meaning massive releases of decades’ worth of film and TV. This wasn’t entirely one hundred percent true, there were always a few things that were stuck in rights hell (WKRP In Cincinnati) or were being purposely withheld from the public (The Day The Clown Cried) and there were of course all sorts of very old films that had, prior to the VHS/DVD revolutions, degraded into unwatchability simply by fact of their age. But, as a general rule, you could with a reasonable amount of effort from 1990-2010 get your hands on almost any movie ever made and most of the TV as well.
Those revolutions are, at this point, effectively over.

Consider, for example, Ian McKellen’s Richard III. This movie is, in large part, the reason why Ian McKellen is famous now – certainly he was an acclaimed stage actor before it, but Richard III catapulted him into “name” actor status – he’s stated bluntly that Richard was responsible for him getting his Oscar-nominated role in Gods and Monsters, which in turn led to him becoming Magneto and Gandalf. And on top of that, Richard III is a really great, visually daring and creatively inspired Shakespeare adaptation. It has a score of 96% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Richard III has been out of print for years. It – like so many movies – has not migrated to Blu-Ray (which increasingly as a format is being primarily used for new releases rather than “archive films”). You cannot stream it on any streaming service. Your only chance of paying even a reasonable price for it is to find a used copy at a decent price, and there are not that many copies floating around.

And Richard III is not an outlier. Consider Big Night, one of the best-reviewed films of 1996 – it’s only twenty years old – and which is now not reasonably affordable. Also from 1996 is Shine, which is far more expensive than it has any right to be considering Geoffrey Rush won his Best Actor award for it. (You can find region-locked DVDs and even Blu-Rays of it for a more reasonable price – if you happen to have an all-region player. But region-locking only contributes to the problem.) There are plenty more of these if you care to look, and I’m only talking right now about relatively high-profile high-regarded films. (If you want a copy of Millionaire Express, Sammo Hung’s classic 1986 kung fu western, you will pay through the nose for it.)

This is the long tail of movie and TV ownership, and it’s coming faster than anybody realizes as movies start going out of print faster than they are introduced to print and the existing stockpile continues to diminish. People in the modern context often question why movies on television were such a thing before the home-theatre revolution, but they were a thing because, for the most part, outside of repertory theatre chains (which have mostly died out at this point), occasional TV screenings were the only way most people could watch many films.

And streaming simply is not catching up. I’m not bashing Netflix particularly here. It’s a good service that offers a good variety of content both original and classic. But you can’t rely on Netflix. Non-exclusive content floats in and out of Netflix on a basis that is nearly whimsical in nature, and Netflix’ profit model means it is not reasonably ever going to have All The Movies or even anything beyond a small fraction of that, and more to the point a lot of Netflix’ catalogue is bottom-dwelling crap that exists primarily to boost its overall catalogue numbers, and Netflix’s catalogue numbers are smaller than most people realize because they are boosted by counting individual TV episodes as individual viewable items. And it skews very, very heavily – for reasons which are quite understandable from a business perspective – towards the recent. Netflix’s “classic” sections are typically very thinly populated. And other streaming services have the same problems. Sure, Hulu has (most of) the Criterion Collection, but get outside of it and pickings get slim for older fare. (I don’t have Amazon streaming, so I don’t know how good that is in this regard.)

The problem – as always – is copyright. Richard III and the like not being easily available on DVD is the result of copyright; its owners have determined that it is not profitable for them to produce copies of the movie for public consumption. (Or, in some cases, have determined that it is more profitable to only allow the movies to be in print/available for streaming on a limited basis – this is the Disney Vault strategy, and Netflix has occasionally advertised films “returning” to Netflix in a way that makes one think that they consider this to be a viable marketing strategy in the streaming era.)

What has happened here is somewhat akin what happens to orphan works. Orphan works exist because their owners die or disappear and cannot exercise their copyrights. In the case of Richard III, what has happened is that an owner is choosing to not produce copies. And this is despite the fact that we live in an era where it is simpler than ever to produce individual copies – digital copies if nothing else. (At my birthday party, Mike Hoye made the point that it is effectively impossible to purchase many books which were bestsellers in the 1940s and 1950s at this point because of copyright, even though we live in a print-on-demand era where purchase of such works should be simpler rather than more complex; I note that this trend is accelerating rather than decelerating.)