This past month, I started my DVD collection.
I love physical media. I love the feeling of holding a movie in your hands before you watch it. The cover art, the little DVD case, the disc itself, the weird promotional text on the back. I love walking into a movie store and having to actually look through everything. There’s something so satisfying about finding a movie you love sitting on a shelf and getting to take it home with you.
I also love the process of collecting them. Going into a record store or a thrift store and digging through the shelves without knowing what you're going to find. Finding a movie you love for 99¢ feels infinitely more exciting than adding it to another streaming watchlist.
And I think there's something really personal about what ends up on your shelf.
If you walked into my room and looked through my DVDs, you'd probably learn a lot about me. The movies I've watched a hundred times. The movies that made me want to make things. The movies I associate with a specific summer or a specific person. The movies that I think are perfect. The movies I bought purely because I love the poster. Eventually, the collection becomes this physical little archive of your taste.
I've also realized that I like movies more when I have something tangible attached to them. I love movie posters and books and magazines and soundtracks for the same reason. I'm just a very physical-media person. I like being surrounded by the things I'm interested in.
And honestly, I think we're entering a really fun era for film collecting. People are caring about DVDs again. People are buying old VHS tapes, collecting Blu-rays, going to shops looking for movies. Physical media has somehow become cool again, and as someone who already spends way too much time talking about movies, I am obviously going to participate.
So this is me officially starting my collection. I have absolutely no idea where I'm going to put all of these.
But that's a problem for future me.
