I’m tired of pretending that physical media isn’t better than digital streaming

With movie theaters facing a turbulent future, and ticket prices continuing to rise, movies and TV at home have become the main choice for family entertainment. But even as someone who considers himself a movie fan –I watch movies for a living– I didn’t fully understand how dire the situation was with choices at home…until I had my baby earlier this year, and I couldn’t go to the movie theater nearly as much as I used to.

And all thanks to that small circle of temporary death. Even Beyoncé made fun of it when she indirectly told Netflix that it was better not to play with the NFL Christmas Halftime Show. We’re standing here in front of the Western space disco diva, and we agree: the biggest flaw in streaming is the inconsistent communication, and the wildly inappropriate moments that can feature suspension of disbelief in storytelling glitches on any platform.

At the beginning of the year, when I was early in my pregnancy, I was assigned to observation Furiosa At the magnificent IMAX headquarters in Los Angeles. To prepare, I thought I’d turn on Max and rewatch Mad Max: Road of anger. To my quick surprise and dismay, what was discovered within a few minutes of watching the film was that something was wrong with the sound of the score. My husband and I have long been scheduling moviegoers—we’re there on the first or second showing on opening day—and we remember how… Mad Max: Fury Road It seemed. This was not the case. After we discovered that something had gone wrong with Max’s streaming service compressing the audio files, we switched to our digital copy. And it still doesn’t seem quite right. So we extracted our Blu-ray discs, inserted them, and there they were: the pure sounds of Junkie XL’s warring drums and guitars emanating from our speakers.

I knew that as a parent, I would have to get used to more home entertainment than before. I’ll admit, even on rewatches or first-time rewatches of classics, I prefer to experience them on the big screen in revival houses like New Beverly, American Cinemathque, or Vidiots. If I loved it on the big screen, I would then go to my favorite store or video store to add this title to my collection – only to watch it if the occasion called for it.

Now that the future movie lover has joined our family, my husband and I are excited to curate their entertainment for as long as possible. This applies to TV shows as well. It was our home bluish Family even before we welcomed our little one; There won’t be Cockmilon, Peppa Pig,or Minions If we can help him. Moving on from childless millennials who loved bluish For new parents, it’s been a complete journey to make sure our kids experience the show the way it’s supposed to. It was no surprise that when Disney acquired Ludo Studio, they did some editing and blocking of episodes, though they thankfully backed away from that for the most part.

However, we went and tracked the first two seasons on DVD to circumvent any unwanted sanitization, and got the music from the show on vinyl. Like, really, why do we have to sit through all the international credits in silence before playing the next episode?

Staying home postpartum over the holidays was a whole other learning curve; For the most part, these were buffering outages typical while using most streaming services. Sure, it could just be my Internet connection but that’s not a problem when you have a Blu-ray player and a good disc.

You might be wondering, if I’m so bothered about watching movies on Max, Disney+, Netflix, etc., why don’t I just watch them from my movie collection? It’s funny you ask, because it’s not a very funny story: I moved during the pandemic and someone to steal Our physical media collection – with the exception of one of our absolute favorites. That’s right, somewhere in the valley, someone got their film school’s greatest hits onto Blu-ray and DVD right next to a moving truck. rude.

How does this factor into my current predicament as a parent?

our Teen mutant Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Pizza box collection? gold. How did we realize? Shortly before viewing Mutant chaos We looked through our box. There wasn’t, so we went searching to see which platform had the original films. Paramount? Oh, we don’t share! The same goes for if you want to catch up Sonic Movies before watching Sonic the Hedgehog 3. Spending time with a kid at home has been a complete chaos trying to figure out what streaming service has what, seeing some titles that have been pulled, and trying to figure out if we still have what we wanted to watch.

For example, we’re still in the height of festive movie season; If you want to watch American tail For Chanukah, tough luck. Amblin’s animated films aren’t what you pay for. You can rent or buy Fievel’s Adventures on Prime Video, but if, like most households, you’re paying for multiple platforms that you can’t even share with your loved ones anymore, that drives up the cost. And even if you subscribe to Disney+ and want to watch it FrozenGood luck trying to stream it at the same time millions of other people are home over winter break. Keep getting Frozen I won’t let that go.

So, unless you own it and hope your PS4 will still work, it’s a complete problem. A whole problem I’ll write about in a new column about the importance of physical media and the best way to watch it at home. Fortunately, we got a PS5 for Christmas, so the journey begins now and in time evil has been released on Blu-ray, and hopefully we’ll get some answers.

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