Kevin Costner says Netflix will never kill the DVD - and the Yellowstone actor may be right

Kevin Costner attends the "Horizon: An American Saga" press conference at the 77th annual Cannes Film Festival at Palais des Festivals on May 20, 2024 in Cannes, France. Photo / Getty Images

As anyone who has watched JFK will attest, Kevin Costner likes a conspiracy theory. So his claim, in an interview promoting his western passion project Horizon: An American Saga, that “DVD is not dead, at all. That’s what they’d have you believe” seems perfectly in character.

But unlike Jim Garrison, the New Orleans district attorney he played in Oliver Stone’s film, the actor may have a point. Costner, being the current King of Dad TV thanks to his hit Paramount series Yellowstone, was thinking of his own audience. “A lot of people that like my movies, they can’t get to a theatre, and they’re waiting for that moment,” he added.

On the face of it, Costner’s statement does appear ludicrous set against Netflix ending its DVD delivery service last autumn. This prompted most people to express surprise that Netflix still had a DVD delivery service.

And yet… the DVD format is very far from being for dads only. In the UK last year, disc sales were worth £170 million ($354m) - including DVD, Blu-ray and 4K UHD - according to figures from the British Association for Screen Entertainment (Base).

While this is not an enormous chunk of the total home entertainment market for the year, totalling £4.43 billion, sales of Blu-ray are actually increasing. The desire for physical product in the digital age helped fund HMV’s return to its old Oxford Street store last November, after going into administration in 2019.

“Physical visual entertainment sales are positive in the UK - it is a market highly serviced by fandom, who tend to buy the 4K high-end additional content version, which is a buoyant market because fans see it as the best out of cinema viewing experience,” explains Louise Kean-Wood, head of marketing at Base.

“But also, the rise of streaming has started to present an ownership issue, especially for people juggling subscriptions. If you drop a sub, you may lose your favourite TV or film, certain TV shows that bounce around the streamers as the rights change hands so you suddenly can’t see it.”

This was the point Christopher Nolan made to fans ahead of the DVD release of Oppenheimer. He urged them to embrace “a version you can buy and own at home and put on a shelf so no evil streaming service can come steal it from you”, telling the Washington Post “there is a danger these days that if things only exist in the streaming version, they do get taken down. They come and go - as do broadcast versions of films. But the home video version is the thing that can always be there, so people can always access it”.

Avatar director James Cameron agreed, telling Variety, “The streamers are denying us any access whatsoever to certain films. And I think people are responding with their natural reaction, which is, ‘I’m going to buy it, and I’m going to watch it any time I want’.”

The message certainly worked for Nolan. The 4K Ultra-HD version of Oppenheimer sold out in its first week and copies changed hands on eBay for as much as US$200 ($330). Oppenheimer Oscar-winner Cillian Murphy proves Nolan’s point. He broke through in 2002′s zombie hit 28 Days Later, but try finding that on a streamer. Or, to be fair, a new disc. eBay copies fetch over £50.

And there are plenty of similar examples. Do you like David Lynch? Fancy watching his seminal debut Eraserhead? It’s sadly unavailable on streamers. Fancy Dawn of the Dead? Cocoon? Jack Nicholson in Prizzi’s Honor? Or are you a 1990s pop fan looking for Spice World? A boomer yearning for thirtysomething? What about cop classic Homicide: Life on the Street? No subscription will give you these.

At Netflix, streaming has long dwarfed DVD rentals, with 193 million subscribers paying to access non-stop entertainment online. Photo / 123RF

This may be why Doctor Who DVDs sell so well - Whovians are well-aware the show’s history involves an awful lot of missing tapes, forgotten episodes and unreleased classics. Which may explain why The Snowman, the Doctor’s 2012 Christmas special, spent a number of weeks in the top 10 DVD charts last year, according to Base figures.

Kean-Wood stresses it’s not just high-end 4K discs selling to cineastes that make the market. In these inflation-riven times, she points out, family films just make more financial sense on old-school DVD.

“Last year, Dwayne Johnson’s Black Adam was the biggest-selling DVD in the UK after an okay theatrical performance,” she explains. “The price of DVDs has held for 15 years, while getting tickets for a family of five to the cinema has gone up. Five tickets versus £9.99 for the DVD and unlimited watches is an attractive proposition.”

Physical DVDs are also a vital revenue stream for smaller films - meaning, most of the interesting ones. Independent filmmaker Noam Kroll broke the maths down in a recent blog post aimed at indie directors. “If you’re using digital/social media ads to promote a film on streaming, you’re lucky if you break even,” he explained. “In most cases, you will lose money even if you do everything right. That’s not because the advertising doesn’t work, but because your profit margins are practically non-existent.”

Kevin Costner in Horizon: An American Saga.

He estimated the average advertising spend on social media to secure a rental on iTunes at $3, and viewers pay just $2.99 to watch the movie. “Once Apple takes their fees, you are losing money,” he fumed. “And don’t get me started on Amazon. On the other hand, if you spend that same $3 to advertise for a $20 DVD/Blu-Ray sale that costs $5 to make and ship, you just profited $12.”

Enough sales, and that might make the difference between profit and loss for a small film, he argued, which might be the prompt for this week’s DVD purchase of the year.

Wes Anderson’s chief backer Indian Paintbrush, the production company owned by junk bond and aluminium magnate Steven Rales, recently bought the Criterion Collection, a DVD-only classic movie distributor which sells titles such as Mulholland Drive for around $40 and turns over an estimated $20m a year. The price has not been revealed.

But given the increasingly self-funding business model of older Hollywood - Costner put $38m of his own money into Horizon, while Francis Ford Coppola stumped up $120m to make his poorly reviewed Megalopolis - they may soon be relying on the Kroll model of funding. Coming soon to a disc near you: all the stuff you actually like.