The Last Red Envelope, Or: Netflix DVDs' long goodbye

Sure, it time was long past. But the Netflix DVD era was a very important one for a whole generation of cineastes.

This Friday, September 29, will mark the final day for Netflix's DVD-by-mail business, the company announced back in April. The announcement wasn't much of a surprise, because it's been clear for quite a long time that Netflix's heart was no longer in the business that first put it on the map. 

Remember when Netflix tried to spin off its DVD business into a separate company called "Qwikster," and then quickly backed off the plan? That happened in 2011, 12 years ago, and two years before Netflix even launched its first original show. The company launched in 1998, meaning that it's spent nearly half of its history running away from the legacy of DVDs. 

Still though, what a legacy. 

I first signed up for Netflix — meaning, at the time, the DVDs-by-mail — in December of 2003. I was single and living in Hoboken, N.J., where I had arrived two years earlier, and was thrilled to discover there was a huge, multi-level Blockbuster just blocks from my apartment which offered a much more extensive selection than the tiny one in my previous Manhattan neighborhood. My TV at the time, alas, was still tiny, but at least I had better movies to watch on it. 

I don't remember where I first heard about Netflix, but I ultimately signed up and discovered an even better selection than what was offered by Blockbuster or other video stores- hence that sector's nearly complete demise within a few years. The story of how Netflix overtook Blockbuster has been told often, including in the 2020 documentary “Netflix vs. the World”; I interviewed its director Shawn Cauthen three years ago, and the film is available to watch on… Amazon’s Prime Video, as well as Tubi and Pluto TV.

I might now be a professional film writer who watches way more movies each year than the average person, but I feel like my usage of Netflix, over time, is fairly typical of subscribers to the disc service. 

Looking through the history of my account — and you can find yours here, for a least another five days — I rented 773 movies from Netflix, over the course of nearly 20 years. The first movie I ever received from the service was Haskell Wexler's 1969 classic Medium Cool, and after that came Charlie Kaufman's movie Human Nature, and a couple of TV movies- Don King: Only in America (with Ving Rhames as Don King) and Citizen Cohn (with James Woods as Roy Cohn.) 

For the first several years I subscribed, I appeared to mostly toggle between classic movies that I'd never seen before and relatively new releases that I'd missed in theaters. This was possible because, once again, Netflix's disc library at the time had just about every movie I could ever imagine wanting to watch, including almost everything that had just left theaters. 

As the years went on, especially after I moved to Pennsylvania and became an actual working film critic, I used Netflix to watch mostly newer movies rather than older ones. 

I had the three-discs-at-a-time option for many years, before later knocking it down to just one, but I was still watching the discs very regularly. 

Going through the list, there are movies I barely remember at all, yet there are other films I absolutely love — Capturing the Friedmans, Masked and Anonymous, Velvet Goldmine, Bubba Ho-Tep — that I first watched on the service, and that was just in the first couple of years. 

As the decade turned to the 2010s, and streaming began to rise, my dependence on Netflix's discs became less and less. Part of that was getting more access as a critic, especially once I started receiving year-end screeners. But I suspect I'm not the only person who, in the last couple of years, has often had a single Netflix disc sitting on the shelf for months. The last time I really watched a lot of Netflix discs was during the lockdown phase of the pandemic. 

As time has gone on, especially with the rise of the many streaming services, Netflix has started to have fewer and fewer discs of newer movies on offer. I used to take it as a given that any movie I missed in theaters would head straight from my "saved" queue to the regular queue. That's started to happen less and less often. The only 2023 movie I've watched from a Netflix disc was The Pope's Exorcist, which happened to land on the Netflix streaming service at the same time. 

And if I’m thinking about watching an older movie, I’m usually going to check TCM, the streaming services, and the VOD options, and it’s available in one of those places, I can watch it right away, as opposed to waiting a couple of days for the disc to arrive.

I certainly understand why the Netflix DVD business is going away. The technology has been overtaken, and the company itself appears to have seen that coming, at least a decade in advance, which was much more proactive than they were about certain other things. While the future of how streaming is going to shake out is very much up in question, there are quite a few ways to watch movies with relative ease these days. 

But all that said, I look back fondly on a delivery system that introduced me to some of my favorite movies, and certainly changed the way I watch them.