Physical media vs streaming- pros and cons

You may be having a bad week, but at least you haven’t plunged headfirst into irrelevancy and chaos as much as Warner Brothers Discovery this week.

Long story short, the streaming bubble might be about to burst. And there’s gonna be a surge in physical media. I LOVE DVDs. I own several, and my collection is precious. BUT, I still watch most of my films on streaming services. I think both ways of watching films are perfectly valid – I’m not a physical media purist and won’t shame people for not owning a DVD player and can’t watch films on DVD. That’s pretty judgemental. Nothing wrong with watching films just on a laptop on what services you have. Like me! From next month when I’m back at university, all I’ll have to watch films with would be the cinema, which always has limited choice, or on my laptop. I only have a handful of DVDs, all of which I’ve already seen (more on this later), and I have a DVD player but it can’t play Blu-Ray (again, more on this later). Most of the time, I watch film and television on streaming media. 

I like physical media, but I also appreciate and value streaming. So let’s look at the pros of DVDs and why I always consider it important –

The main reason is the fact that DVDs are a full product. On top of the “feature” (be it the film or TV show), I expect a product that gives me stuff I wouldn’t get if I had just watched on Netflix. The best DVDs have all sorts of extras – for me, commentaries and documentaries are a big factor in me buying a DVD. If I just wanted the film, I’d just watch the film, basically (£10 for one DVD and nothing else or £10 a month for hundreds of products including the one I’m watching) for free, on a service. But if I want a proper physical product, film included, because I love it so much, I will go for the DVD. Bloopers, deleted scenes, unique features I get on physical media, beautiful art cards or little booklets or even a gorgeous DVD cover – Arrow Video’s masterful restorations of Dario Argento’s films are works of art, for example. You get an awesome film with great extras and exclusive artwork – I’ve talked about why I love commentaries before, but I love the whole DVD, most of the time. If you want me to buy the DVD, give me MORE.

Also, a wall of physical media looks nice. It just does.

From left to right – Batman: The Animated Series, 5 miscellaneous animated Batman films, Casino Royale, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Donnie Darko, Dredd Enter the Dragon, Gladiator, Hot Fuzz, Inception, the OG Jurassic Park trilogy, Kingdom of Heaven Director’s Cut, Last Night in Soho, Lawrence of Arabia, Logan, MCU Phases 1 and 3, Nightmare Before Christmas, Pacific Rim, Shang-Chi, Shaun of the Dead, Spider-Man 2, The Suicide Squad, Terminator 2 Judgement Day, The World’s End, and every X-Men film up to Days of Future Past in my precious Cerebro Collection. Yes I do things alphabetically. It looks cool.

OK, so, what are the negatives of physical media?

Pacific Rim: The Black is literally everything 12 year old me ever wanted ever – rambling review time!

It’s quite hard to believe it’s been nearly ten years since Guillermo del Toro’s awesome/dumb “giant robot punches giant monsters in the face for two hours” Pacific Rim. This is a film that will always be close to my heart – it blew my mind as a 12 year old and is one of the biggest motivations for me to get into filmmaking. I still have the toys and watching it a couple of years ago, it still holds up. However, it’s not exactly a film I think about 24/7 anymore. Time’s past, and whilst it’s a film I’ll always hold dear, other films have taken its place as my favourite. It’s why I never watched Uprising – I would’ve if the reviews were good, but they weren’t, so that was that. We still have the first film. Honestly, I’d be pretty happy if we never got another Pacific Rim film.

Well, as of yesterday, that’s changed. Netflix’s recent Pacific Rim anime intrigued me with a promise of a darker tone closer to del Toro and Travis Beacham’s original world so I thought, “why not?”. All I’ll say is that when shops reopen, my first purchase will be a Pacific Rim DVD. My love of this franchise has come flooding back thanks to Pacific Rim: The Black. It’s only seven episodes but it effortlessly continues the original film’s ideas with brilliant new lore additions and a brilliant set of characters.

The series takes a different approach to the films in that it doesn’t focus on the Pan-Pacific Marine Corps or the people in charge, it instead goes for an “after the end” narrative, focusing on a post-apocalyptic Australia years after the events of the films and twins Hayley and Taylor, whose parents left them to fight Kaiju and have since been presumed dead. The series focuses on the twins heading to Sydney in an attempt to find more people, in a training Jaeger called Atlas Destroyer… which has no weaponry. Oh, and there’s Kaiju. Let the battles commence!

Every film I watched in February 2021

28 days, a few days shorter than the other months, yet for some reason I couldn’t maintain a consistent film schedule despite now being back at university and watching films for work now! Regardless, an… interesting bunch of films when I got the chance to, probably the most nuts bunch yet.

• Saint Maud

I’ve been looking forward to this film a lot, hearing about its qualities from filmmakers like Edgar Wright. So I went in pretty high expectations, and was quite impressed on the whole. The film is about a nurse who is driven by her faith and believes herself to be a saviour of a disabled woman she is looking after. The film is *slow* – this is not a fast paced horror film and it’s mainly character building in the first third before things get more abstract then the final ten minutes come out of nowhere and smack you right in the face. The ending scene is going to go down in horror film history as one of the greats. Fantastic stuff on the whole – not quite up there as one of my favourite horror films, but certainly an interesting, symbolism filled experience.

Every film I saw in August 2020

I saw LOTS of films this month. Lots. So why waste any time? Let’s get straight to it!

• The Void

How will the coronavirus pandemic affect cinemas? The future of film is streaming

Last year, the film industry suffered from a string of under performing blockbusters. The problem in 2019 was oversaturation- too many films at the same time. But in 2020, it seemed studios, having learnt their lesson, spread things out a bit. We had Bond in April, Black Widow in May, Wonder Woman in June… the film calendar seemed set for the year.

And then…

Across the world, cinemas have closed, films have been delayed and productions shut down due to the coronavirus pandemic. James Bond and Black Widow are two of the biggest casualties. But they’re just the start. Disney have basically cancelled their other films (including The New Mutants, which is THE most cursed film in history), Universal have released all their films online early and the film industry is losing millions by the day. It’s a situation understandably out of their control, but here’s the thing- I think Hollywood can not only recover, but use this situation as a testing ground for new means of film distribution.

Hey, at least the delay means I have more time to marathon the Daniel Craig films.

Stranger Things Season 3 review (full spoiler warning)

Ben’s Month of Reviews continues with one of my most anticipated events of the year- the arrival of a new season of Stranger Things. Yes, I was late to the hype train (I began watching April last year to be precise) but I love this show. It made David Harbour into one of my all time favourite actors, got me on my current Stephen King reading binge (his novels, particularly It and Firestarter, are huge influences on the show) and finally pursuaded me get a Netflix account that introduced me to other shows I love such as Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Castlevania and has greatly helped me with the amount of films I watch. It also really really made me want to live in the 80’s to the extent I have now seen more 80’s films that is humanly possible, including many with the veteran Stranger Things actors such as Winona Ryder, Sean Astin and Cary Elwes. If you’re wondering why my monthly film lists consist of so many odd 80’s films and kid’s films such as The Goonies, blame Stranger Things. So yeah, this little show about a group of kids in the world’s unluckiest town has made quite a big impact on me. Not since Doctor Who had I become so obsessed with a show so quickly. For comparison, it took me a couple of episodes to get passionate about Firefly and roughly half a season to “get” Rick and Morty. With Stranger Things, it only took the gorgeous opening synth titles. No one agrees with me, but I thought Stranger Things 2 was the better season- the first was iconic yes, but Season 2 had the best Hopper writing, Dad Steve and Sean Astin. I spent last Thursday binging the entirety of Season 3 and because everyone’s seen it let’s go full spoilers here. Although if you still haven’t seen it yet, in brief- it’s good. Very very good. With that said, let’s dive into Hawkins with all the juicy details-

The Umbrella Academy is weird, wonderful and well worth a watch

As we are enjoying the golden age of comic book adaptations, it’s worth remembering not every superhero property is Marvel or DC. We have the Incredibles, Hellboy, Dredd and many more making the genre interesting and diverse. Netflix’s latest smash hit (you can how much of a success a show is based on the amount of memes, which this show has lots of) The Umbrella Academy is such a property, based on the Dark Horse comic book by Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba that presents a family of super-heroic characters who are so dysfunctional the X-Men look like a perfectly functioning team in comparison.

What happened to the Marvel Netflix universe?

The Defenders are no more. Yesterday Netflix announced that The Punisher and Jessica Jones were cancelled, becoming the final casualties of the Marvel purge on Netflix. Whilst many may be quick to blame Disney’s upcoming streaming service for this as far as I know the Marvel/Netflix deal had nothing to do with Disney and it appears the shows were cancelled due to low viewing figures and lack of interest from even hardcore Marvel fans. So what happened? How did what promised to be the most exciting branch of the Marvel Cinematic Universe become no more?

Every film I saw in January 2019

As a huge film buff I watch many films a year, and I’ve always intended to make a list of films I’ve seen so I can count how many I saw at the end of a year. I’ve decided to do this one month at a time, starting from January obviously, with the films being in the order I saw them. I won’t go too in depth with them, just summarise them and give my brief thoughts but hopefully I will have a wide range of titles by the end of each moth. Every film I watch counts, including films I’ve already seen. Cinema, Netflix, Sky, DVD… anything I see goes on the list. So without further ado, let’s go, forgetting the fact it’s already February 1st-

• Bird Box

Five Marvel characters that would make great Netflix shows

It’s no secret that Marvel rules the silver screen. With the interlocked Marvel Cinematic Universe dominating cinemas, it’s easy to forget the Marvel TV shows, especially when the films themselves do. Since 2015 Netflix has been producing shows based on Marvel comics, intended for an older audience. These shows are dark, gritty and suited to the more adult material that Netflix produces. Launching off the success of Daredevil, the Netflix shows have become a universe in their own right. Jessica Jones, Luke Cage and Iron Fist came soon after, with The Defenders crossover and The Punisher quickly joining them. However I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that the shows are all the same- a gritty anti-hero lives in New York following “the Incident”. The first half has them slowly unravel a conspiracy with the main villain revealing themselves about halfway through and there’s a hallway fight somewhere because of course there is. There is angst, violence, flashbacks and subplots galore. I’m not saying the shows are bad (I haven’t even seen Iron Fist, Luke Cage, Punisher or The Defenders as I’m just not interested) but they are all in the same mould and to be honest, it’s getting a bit tiresome and I don’t find the heroes that interesting. Iron Fist has just been cancelled and I don’t see how the shows can survive without variety in the kind of heroes they focus on. Daredevil Season 3 comes out today, and whilst the show will continue to be outstanding, the Netflix shows as a whole need change and I have five characters who can help with that…