[Nick Zwar]

My experience is similar to Thor’s. I have been a film buff for as long as I can think back, but I do not have that many physical copies of movies. A couple hundred maybe, I don’t know. The main reason: I am really iffy when it comes to quality. Over the decades, I have amassed a lot of music, I have LPs, CDs, digital downloads… but quality is top. I always knew buying movies doesn’t give me the quality I actually want… until Bluray (and later, even better, 4K/UHD disc) came along. So I buy those now occassionally.

The story: I had some issues with movies on VHS and DVD… quality issues. I certainly watched them, and I bought some DVDs, but the quality wasn’t good enough for me to consider “collecting” them… I always waited for something better to come along.

Back in the day, we used to watch a lot of movies on VHS, and I actually had an early Sony Video8 recorder, as that had somewhat better picture and sound quality than VHS. What I did was rent movies on VHS from a local video rental, with a recorder, and then watched and taped them, so I could re-watch and analyze them.

But the quality of VHS and video tape was atrocious, I did not find it satisfactory. So I only bought one pre-recorded VHS tape in my life (Hoosiers, in a supermarket… because it was so cheap, cheaper than renting it at the time). VHS quality was sub-par.
Then came DVD, that was much better… so I did buy a few DVDs… alas, the sound tended to be off. Somehow, picture quality was a huge improvement over VHS (certainly considering what TVs back in the day could show), but the sound was of. I found out, that was because PAL DVDs were often sped up, at 25 frames a second instead of 24. That was the reason why movies in Europe on DVD were often “shorter” than the US version, but it was also a reason why the sound was off. What a bummer. So I never bought that many DVDs… maybe 100… and I got rid of most of them. Because what happened was:

Bluray came along. Wow, now there was a home video format that was finally satisfying… great image, great sound… the first home video medium I really love. So I replaced my DVDs, I got rid of most of them and replaced them with Blurays, because Blurays are finally are “good enough” in quality, so good, you could actually screen them on a big screen. 4K Blurays are even better.

And so I do have some Blurays and 4Ks, not sure how many, but I don’t really “collect” them. Nowadays, I watch movies less than I would listen to an album, so buying most movies seems superfluous. I usually stream movies I want to watch (Amazon Prime has them up to 4K/UHD), and buy only those I really want to keep and watch all the extra stuff.
I do buy my favorite movies or movies I really want to have if there are some exciting editions out there, like I bought the 4K/UHD remastered version of David Fincher’s SEVEN (haven’t watched it yet), because that is one of my all time favorite films (I did have the DVD (which I gave away), the Bluray (which I still have), and now the 4K disc), and I do have some other films I bought (like DUNE I&II), simply because I want to watch them whenever I want in the best possible quality, but I am very selective about what movies I buy. I haven’t counted my Blurays though, so I’m not sure how many I have. A lot less than music though, that’s for sure.

But most movies these days I watch streaming.