After a quarter century of delivering movies to your home, over 5 billion in physical disc form, Netflix is discontinuing its DVD delivery service at the end of September, stuffing the last of its emblematic, red-and-white envelopes in favor of streaming exclusively. Fin.

The reason for the final season –a continuously shrinking DVD marketplace – comes as no surprise. Those DVD subscriptions made up just half of 1% of Netflix’s annual revenue in 2022. But it’s no less disheartening to watch this vestige of home entertainment go the way of the dodo.

Guests to my home are surprised to learn that the vaguely familiar, red-and-white envelope strewn atop a hutch with little else (maybe an errant bill yet to be set up for autodraft or more likely still, local campaign clutter enroute to the recycling bin) is not a long forgotten, unreturned relic, but rather what I’m watching next. And I’m not alone.

Despite this glacially paced seachange, physical media has hung on since the advent of streamers and remained profitable for Netflix; the half of 1% of revenue I mentioned earlier was still worth almost $150 million dollars. If afforded the chance, DVDs will resist extinction, in my bumbling opinion, along with their constituent formats from LaserDisc to Blu-ray, for as long as the earth remains inhabitable, give or take. Championed and conserved by lingering Luddites, sentimentalist, esoteric and voracious cinephiles, and by extension, anybody who wants to watch what they want, more or less, when they want, moving pictures will find their way into our homes and onto our screens by any and every means within our reach.

Free Blockbusters!

Many Richmonders still agree that Video Fan, the former purveyor and cult favorite rental store that was on Strawberry Street in the Fan, remains irreplaceable since closing in 2017. But I’d like to underline just how long it held out, “long past the original doomsday,” as posted on their Instagram sendoff. Now that national video chain stores are all but gone, and the last brick-and-mortar Blockbuster is only serviceable to those in proximity of Bend, Oregon, surviving optical media formats and their analogue antecedent (VHS) have taken to the streets in repurposed blue-and-yellow newspaper dispensers. Branded as Free Blockbusters, these loosely affiliated community lending libraries have cropped up in every state since their inception in 2018, save for Utah, the Dakotas, Nebraska and Arkansas.

Richmond has the distinction of being the first East Coast location with its Church Hill outpost in the spring of 2022; conveniently located near the second 8 ½ location (2709 E. Marshall St.) for a simpatico grab-and-go dinner and a movie opportunity. Since then, area locales have grown to include Northside (4026 MacArthur), Oregon Hill (400 S. Pine St.) and the Fan (403 Strawberry St.).

The credo is simple: take a movie, leave a movie. Be kind, rewind! The Free Blockbuster website encourages starting your own franchise, and provides a downloadable stencil of their logo, stickers and even a short supply of refurbished dispensers for $349. Short of that, they recommend you “DIY it.”

Random crowdsourced curation accounts for the selection you’ll find in a Free Blockbuster bin. Franchise favorites commingle with cult classics, children’s programming from bygone eras, Sports Illustrated bloopers and National Geographic collections, and at least one era of Tom Hanks represented at all times. I’ve found incomplete anthologies, off-season Christmas movies, and even the odd video game before. There’s something for every taste on offer, along with microwaveable popcorn on a good day. It’s a Frankenstein caliber library that ultimately cultivates more breadth than Red Box’s narrow new release scope.

The art of browsing

I can remember a time before video stores, but just barely. Before running wild in video chains of the day (Erol’s before Blockbuster and Hollywood Video), the first movies I brought home as a youth were from the local library. Demand was such that they’d set up a separate operation from the books, complete with its own entrance and staff. You’d approach the counter, which was just above eye level, and a parent would either browse a printed catalog that looked like a phonebook—no pictures—of the VHS inventory shelved behind, or just ask a librarian what was new, since titles were released at a slower clip.

I took home all the clamshell-cased Disney classics, along with the, unbeknownst to me, star-studded Fairy Tale Theater series, and a memorably debauched selection made by pointing at the poster for “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.” I remember the movies I didn’t see from that time as much as the ones I did, their presence populating their section of the library and stoking my imagination. An animated poster for “Adventures in Babysitting” disturbed me for the seemingly real danger these babysitters put their charges in, scaling the side of a skyscraper. I went further, averting my line of sight entirely from a cardboard standee for “Tremors.”

Before long, video rental franchises were everywhere; in our neighborhood, there was eventually a Blockbuster and Hollywood Video that faced each other on opposite sides of the road so that your stop was determined by which direction you were driving in at the time. Imagine your wallet if you had a membership card for every streaming service you signed up for. Instead we’re burdened by the increasingly precarious task of remembering the most current password for each.

Browsing is a perilous act. Seemingly endless streaming options have done little to assuage the weight of what to watch, evidenced by how imprecise and limited our viewing options are in practice. On the surface, it resembles the bygone era of channel surfing; a litany of remote-control roulette. With the exception of prestige television, which the zeitgeist finds and tunes into as it airs, we’re left with bingeable cringe and otherwise random programming scattered across an ever-increasing bevy of subscription-based networks.

Know what you want to watch? It doesn’t matter when specific titles are achingly unavailable or behind a paywall. There’s a case to be made, for those of a certain age, to return to cable television with its plethora of channels or, better yet, the forgotten aisles of a neighborhood video store.

I’ll miss the red-and-white Netflix envelopes arriving at my door. Sometimes neglected, left lying in wait, like the entire summer that would never produce an opportune time to watch “Women Talking” with my fiancée. “Can’t we watch something easy?” —her. “I heard the book was funny” —me.

Or more fruitful spans where I’d watch and return a pair of movies inside the workweek. There were countless discs lost and found in unlikely places (“The Room” in a suitcase, “Apocalypse Now Redux” in a case for “Back to the Future 2”). Or I’ll admit it, otherwise rare or out-of-print titles that found their way into my personal library after sneakily reporting them lost in the mail to the parent company.

For now, I’m glad to see these cherished objects remain cheap or ideally free, to be borrowed and shared and watched in perpetuum.