The DVD’s Demise Leaves Many Films Gone With the Wind

No more. Netflix’s recent announcement that it will discontinue its physical DVD distribution business later this year is a catastrophic act of cultural destruction, yet it was greeted with a shrug. What did we expect? No one watches those shiny metal discs anymore. Anyway, every movie worth watching is available somewhere on streaming—right?

Wrong. The demise of the DVD marks the effective disappearance of most movies, one of our most influential creative forms. “America’s biggest export is no longer the fruit of its fields or the output of its factories, but the mass-produced products of its popular culture—movies, TV programs, music, books and computer software,” Paul Farhi and Megan Rosenfeld observed in the Washington Post in 1998. Foreign consumption of American movies, a product that still runs a big trade surplus, is a $17-billion-a-year business. Cinema is our living past and our 20th-century masterwork; it teaches Americans how to kiss, smoke, drink, fight, propose marriage, talk, drive—even how to die.

Film buffs wonder how three-quarters of all silent films—including more than 90% of those made before 1929—could be gone forever, or how every title released by 20th Century Fox before 1932 was lost in a studio-vault fire. How could our ancestors have been so careless and disrespectful to our cultural patrimony?

Many of the movies disappearing from national consciousness were popular, important and critically acclaimed. In 2018 the film-data researcher Stephen Follows tracked the availability of the 100 top-grossing films from 1970 to 2017. Those released in the most recent decade were available via streaming, digital renting or purchase. As Mr. Follows worked back in time, however, movies became hard to find commercially. Just half of top-grossing films from the early 1970s could be streamed. Older, less profitable, experimental and independent works hardly streamed at all.

If it’s worth seeing, you may think, the magic of the marketplace will bring it to Hulu or Amazon Prime. This month the Washington Post’s Ty Burr reminds us of some movies we can’t stream: “Cocoon” (1985), directed by Ron Howard, “Short Cuts” (1993) by Robert Altman, “New York, New York” (1977) by Martin Scorsese, “Henry & June” (1990) by Philip Kaufman and “Silkwood” (1983) by Mike Nichols.

Of the 23,000-plus movies released in the U.S. since 1899, streaming services offer only 7,300—and that includes foreign titles. If a film happens to be streaming somewhere, odds are it’s on a platform you don’t pay for. The average American household subscribes to four streaming services out of the many available.

Public libraries offer a fraction of the DVDs you could find at a decent independent rental outlet during the 1990s. You might still be able to buy a DVD of a movie that’s been deplatformed, or scare up an old copy on .

In every change of medium, thousands of works, many of them important and notable, fail to make the transition. A lot of movies never made the move from VHS to DVD and are known today only to obsessive collectors or no one at all. Now, with the demise of Netflix’s mail service, we have the loss of the simple and cheap DVD rental.

Is there a remedy? A government entity with relevant experience such as the National Archives’ vast Moving Image and Sound Holdings in College Park, Md., could be tasked with the creation of a national digital lending library. Authors and publishers are required to supply the Library of Congress with copies of books when they apply for copyright. Filmmakers could be required to do the same. Congress could dictate that works become available via a digital lending library after they haven’t been commercially streamed for a set number of years.

Such an arrangement could provide royalties for creators and their estates. Fees could be collected either à la carte, as on Amazon Prime, or as part of a HBO Max-style bulk subscription model, and remitted in whole or in part to rights holders. Alternatively, nonstreamed movies could be declared to be in the public domain after a certain period. This would create an incentive for new services.

Whatever the solution, we shouldn’t blithely assume that everything—or even everything worthwhile—will make the jump to a new medium. We had loss in the change from the analog to the digital, from the physical to the compressed computer file, and we will have more loss when we change from those compressed files to whatever the future holds. We should acknowledge the worth of our rich cinematic heritage and ensure that it remains accessible to future generations.

Mr. Rall is a political cartoonist, columnist and author, most recently, of “The Stringer.”