Movie Tragic: Why is it so difficult to rent a movie these days?

How often over the past few years have Irish people sat down to rent a film online, to discover that the only option available is to buy it outright, asks Simon Tierney.

Renting a movie: the glory days of dipping into film and telly libraries are gone with the end of physical media

I used to love renting movies in the days of bricks-and-mortar video shops. I have a vivid memory of racing into the Xtra-vision in Nenagh one Friday after school in 1996 to rent Men in Black, which had just been released on video. I was too late. All 15 copies had already flown off the shelves. 

The man at the counter sensed my disappointment and suggested I try another movie released that day called Scream. He packed the VHS into one of the iconic red and yellow cases, the musty smell of video tape permeating the shop as I left with my movie.

The experience of renting a film was special. It involved a journey. This made the whole enterprise more meaningful somehow. The temptation is to remember this as something quaint and backwards. But the truth is that the consumer experience, when it comes to renting films, has not evolved so much as regressed. In the past, every movie that had been in the cinema, almost without exception, would be rentable within a month or two of leaving the multiplex. Now, this isn’t the case. In fact, most recent movies cannot be rented at all. They are instead available for purchase only.

In the glory days of video collecting, it made sense to own films. You could stack them on your shelf. Your video collection said something about you. Whenever I went to a house party during my college days in the early noughties, the first thing I would do was peruse the host’s video and DVD collection, browsing enviously through someone’s full and complete collection of the 007 franchise or perhaps snobbily changing my perceptions about the host upon discovering their predictable affection for every single Star Wars movie.

Those days are gone, since film went digital. “There’s this whole thing about the ‘Digital Dark Age,’” says Brian Lloyd, Movies Editor for Entertainment.ie. “We’re all taking (digital) pictures and watching stuff on Netflix but in 10 or 20 years time all this could just disappear.”

One industry insider, who preferred not to be named, explained how the progress of a movie, from theatrical release to home entertainment, actually works nowadays. “It gets priority in cinemas, to drive any kind of cultural awareness of a movie” he said.

Once a film leaves the cinema it may go on to PVOD (Premium Video on Demand), then on to VOD (a Video on Demand service such as Netflix) and finally it may end up on terrestrial television some time down the line, he explained. “That is the lifecycle of a movie.”

But where does the renting model fit into this lifecycle? I carried out research in order to discover whether or not the films I have found to be unrentable are an anomaly or if there is a broader movement away from renting altogether. I conducted a survey of the top 10 box office hits of 2023 and the results are revealing.

Despite the 10 surveyed movies having been released last year, just four of them can be rented by Irish customers. The rest must be bought. The most popular film of 2023, Barbie, cannot be rented in Ireland. Oppenheimer, so popular in Ireland because of Cillian Murphy’s Oscar triumph, is also unrentable here. The only option is to buy it on YouTube for €10.99 or in the Sky Store for a whopping €15.99.

Some films in the top 10 are on streaming platforms. The Little Mermaid is available to Disney + subscribers and the latest Mission Impossible can be watched on Paramount Plus. But again, this requires a prior payment subscription. Not everyone wants to sign up to a streaming platform.

So, we are required to shell out cold, hard cash for the privilege of “owning” the computer file of the films in question. But do you really own it at all? Geoffrey Morrison, writing in the New York Times, suggests that “what you’re purchasing in most cases is a license to watch that video”.

So, if the platform you bought the film from went bust, so would your MP4. You never really own a digital film.

The big question is this: why are some films rentable and others are not? Uneven distribution models create an unpredictable and frustrating experience for consumers. It’s disappointing to sit down and watch a new release only to discover that an option to rent isn’t available.

Lloyd argues that the entire rental model has virtually disappeared as a release strategy.

“How did it used to work? You would go to Xtra-vision, there would be a load of rental copies, you would rent them, you would drop them back. That was it,” he recalls.

“We don’t have brick-and-mortar shops anymore. The rental market as we remember it is gone. That will never come back.”

But it actually isn’t entirely gone. Forty percent of the movies in my survey are digitally rentable in Irish homes. So why is there such an inconsistent rental landscape now?

“They have very complex licensing agreements,” explains Lloyd. “So you will see certain films are available to rent, but then some aren’t. And then you’ll see certain films
appear on Netflix or Prime Video for 30, 60 or 90 days and then they’re gone. It’s all down to licensing agreements and trying to figure them out is like trying to untangle a bag of wires.”

There also appears to be a belief that pushing a ‘buy only’ option will generate more income for the studios, since purchase fees are considerably higher than rental fees. But forcing consumers to buy a fleeting 90 minute experience can irritate them.

What’s Lloyd’s advice to a young fogey like myself, still clinging onto a model of home entertainment consumption that seems to have expired some time in the last decade?

“Grow up, move on,” Lloyd chuckles to himself.

No thanks, I’ll continue to hold on to my Complete James Bond DVD Collection for the moment.