The Importance of the Rental Experience

With services like Hulu, Netflix, Amazon and even more services you're going to do a search for before the end of this paragraph turning into a fast-growing industry picking up the pieces of the shattered blockbuster model, it's easy to get used to this exciting digital era of movie watching. What we lose in the process are things like Directors Cuts, Special Features and everything that made early 2000's DVDs so revolutionary. A well-done DVD release is a critical force to be reckoned with, tightly packed blocks of content that give you as a fan everything you want to see. It was the movie model I’ve spent most of my life with and frankly that means that it’s the right one.

The middle ground here is, of course, that not everyone buys or watches movies to see Behind the Scenes information or Commentaries, some folks just like to plop down on the couch, watch Steven Segal abuse minorities for 90 minutes and get on with their day. Thus, Netflix. You can make the cheapest, ugliest, least-worthwhile piece of shlock possible and if there's a large enough audience out there (and in the case of Steven Segal and the many, many dads who follow his adventures, there always is) you'll see your movie plucked from the masses by your distributor, offered to Netflix or iTunes on a distribution deal and have a whole new viewer base.

I know that during that interim period when I stopped renting, started using digital services and then started renting again afterwards I found that something was missing. My selection was extremely limited, especially within the confines of 'Canadian Netflix'. I found myself more often than not simply watching what was popular at the time, and 90% of the time it was something AMC had made in the last 5 years. In my opinion, not based on any concrete fact, Netflix deliberately pushes the really popular Network Television stuff and BIG NAME movies so that what a lot of people really got the service for, watching movies they already like, is forgotten. That doesn't diminish the quality of the content at all, far from it. With the exception of The Walking Dead, which is the TV Scripting equivalent of a Francis E Dec rant, the majority of what's really pushed is good, quality TV. It's big budget, bombastic and you love it.

But what has always made movies special to me is that what you find on the fringes is the real indicator of quality. Sony or Disney or NBC/Universal can crank out a certain type of movie with a certain group of actors at a certain time of year and know they'll make bank. Even if they don't domestically succeed big budget action schlock always finds its way to Asia and makes millions. So the model in place is thus: Make a by-the-numbers film that's either straightforward or mildly complicated, release it when the iron's hot, throw it on Netflix if it stuck in the American markets or forget it and try again next year if it didn't. Thus the pool of samey, relentlessly boring action cartoons grows and the space for independent or initially forgotten greats becomes smaller.

Which brings us back to rental stores.
Let’s be honest, with the way Apple, Sony and Microsoft push on demand services with their products, and the fact that digital cable companies can advertise movie package deals out the wazoo (while airing the same 5 movies and terrible series ad infinitum) it might seem like the choice is already made up for you, but seriously think about this: How much time and money do you really put into these services? How many movies or shows a month do you watch? Bluntly put, unless you buy a lot of on-demand television, renting is going to be more expensive. But if you collect physical movies as well, renting is a good go between. And as opposed to unpredictable, distributor-managed on-demand services, renting lets you watch what you want, when you want. So go out and rent. Find the closest rental place you can. Use a convenience store. At the very least, make sure you’re watching what you want to watch and not what THEY want you to watch.