Physical media has become a hot topic lately, as studios move away from it and the market begins to crumble. Meanwhile, an all digital future doesn’t look bright, with big corporations removing entries from your library at will, with no warning and no remuneration. You don’t truly own anything anymore.
But the numbers show a bigger, more troubling picture. It’s not just the big companies that have given up on physical media: consumers have too.
Home media blew up in the ’80s, with video stores giving you a chance to watch a film in the comfort of you home, and if you were really taken with it, could even own your own copy to watch as many times as you liked.
The industry hit its peak in the late-’90s and 2000s, giving studios a new, very lucrative income stream. They could sell a movie in cinemas, then sell the same product to people on physical media. This resulted in some movies that had failed at the box office becoming hits on VHS and DVD, and produced a new kind of product, the straight-to-video film, usually low-budget horror or action, that kept stars like Steven Seagal in work for decades.
Since the 2010, though, the market has been in serious decline.
Disney’s classic The Lion King is considered to be the best-selling physical release of all time, making over $500M in sales, an incredible amount, which shows just how big the market was at the time, and how much extra studios could make from this stream. It’s worth noting the movie had already made almost a billion from theatres alone.
Shifting over ten million copies and making over $100M in grosses was a common feat for popular summer blockbusters and family movies at the time, but that time’s long passed.
Here’s some comparisons of similar movies from different years, and the amounts they made from physical sales:
- Revenge of the Sith (2005) $269M
- The Force Awakens (2015) $174M
- The Avengers (2012) $190M
- Avengers: Endgame (2012) $104M
- Toy Story 3 (2010) $209M
- Toy Story 4 (2019) $53M
- Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) $257M
- The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014) $70M
- The Incredibles (2004) $285M
- Incredibles 2 (2018) $66M
These numbers don’t take into account inflation and price rises either, which would be noticeable over ten to fifteen years, nor the higher prices for premium formats. While there’s going to be some disparity in terms of a film’s popularity, it has to be noted that all the films listed above were big box office successes on release.
Number of units sold shows the sharp decline too. Toy Story 3 moved some 10.9 million units; Toy Story 4, only 2.8 million. The Avengers sold 9.8 million; while Endgame sold barely half that at 4.8 million.
Post-Covid the numbers are even worse.
The best-selling release of 2022 was Spider-Man: No Way Home, a critical hit which made almost two billion at the box office, but a meagre $44M in video sales. Compare that to the divisive Spider-Man 3 which still cleared $114M in 2007.
For 2023, the Super Mario Bros. Movie topped the chart (another billion dollar hit), with a mere $26M in sales.
For 2024, the figures are disastrous, with just $13M and less than 600,000 copies for Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire, the kind of crowd-pleasing movie that would traditionally have done well on home media.
Studios are partly to blame for this decline, pushing their movies onto streaming to give them more control of their IP, without having to deal with third parties. It also lets them keep most of the profits, and removes the added processes of transferring a movie to disc, creating box art, marketing, manufacturing and distributing physical copies to retailers.
But the numbers for physical sales have been declining for years, long before studios tried to capture streaming during Covid. This is down partly to Netflix, but also to Video on Demand, or VOD, which lets you rent or buy a digital copy of a movie at home, through sites like Prime Video.
With retail margins, a studio might see something like 40% for a DVD sale; but their cut of VOD grosses is around twice that.
The data for VOD sales is almost impossible to sell, but certain big movies — presumably the most successful — have had their numbers released. The 2024 film Wicked made over $100M on digital, and there have been similar stats for other films, like Jurassic World: Rebirth. Some of the other numbers I could find do seem rather low, like $66M for Sinners (2025), a critical hit which would seem to deserve a higher gross, though it could be the case, as streaming has fundamentally changed the way we consume movies.
In the past, movies had longer theatrical windows, where they could only be watched in cinemas. It might be four to six months before it released on home video, and then you would have to rely on rental stores and retailers having it available to rent or buy, with popular movies being checked out immediately.
Compare this to the recent release of Jurassic World: Rebirth, one of the biggest hits of 2025. It released in theatres on July 2, yet despite being a strong box office success, grossing $872M, it was available on digital from August 5, just five weeks later, before streaming on Peacock in late October — less than a four months wait for those with a subscription.
Likewise, Fantastic Four: First Steps released on July 25, but not two months later o September 23, it was on digital, before appearing on Disney+ in early November, a couple of weeks after its physical release.
For anyone already subscribed to a service like Disney+, it’s often worth waiting for a couple of months to get it for “free”, rather than paying for it either on VOD, or on physical. This ensures studios keep more control over their IP, as you have to come exclusively to them to see it, but a very lucrative revenue stream has gone forever.
Netflix has been a huge part of this shift. Despite starting out in the ’90s as a DVD rental service which would mail discs to customers, in 2007 it launched its streaming site, where users could watch a limited number of films from its library. Since then, it’s grown to a ridiculous size, with over a quarter of a billion subscribers, and has largely abandoned physical releases to ensure viewers have a reason to keep their subscriptions.
There’s always something new to watch on the site, whether it’s a fifty year old classic or a new release, and it’s much more convenient for consumers, so why wouldn’t they embrace it?
The thing about physical media is that while some people love it, that was never the bulk of the market. People bought and rented videos simply to watch them, because it was a cheap and convenient way to do so. They didn’t necessarily want to keep and treasure them, so much like ebooks replacing cheap paperbacks, when they were presented with an easer way to consume media, which meant less clutter, they took it. As a result, the market pivoted away from them. Studios will no longer take to time and effort to release something in huge numbers that might only make $15M or so.
Companies like The Criterion Collection are doing well, and showing the viability of the format, but their releases are mainly either in niche cinema or re-releases of popular classics, with bonus content and high-quality presentation. The market that would regularly see a recent blockbuster shift $250M worth of discs has gone now.
The era of mass market DVDs is over. It’s not a good thing. There’s something nice about owning a physical thing of your own. Something you can keep, lend to others, collect all the editions — but it’s yours, and can’t be taken away or memory holed by a giant corporation.
Like most trends in modern entertainment, it seems to make things worse, not better, and point to a dimmer, less interesting future.
Films and Fiction 
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