From theatrical to streaming and physical media, chairman Richard Lorber is one of the industry’s foremost champions of art-house cinema – just ask Christopher Nolan and Quentin Tarantino.
Kino Lorber releases a lot of films on DVD. Why are you still betting on physical media?
The physical media business is still an important part of our business, even if it’s in a transitional phase right now. When we entered, it was a $7 billion to $10 billion business; now it’s struggling to be a $1 billion business, but it’s still a $1 billion business. And we see opportunity there, particularly in a world where there’s a rapid deterioration of the availability of titles online. When Netflix had a rental-by-mail business, I did some of their first deals, back in the early [2000s]. Back then, there were about 100,000 titles available from Netflix for rental by mail. As of the latest report, there are probably 3,000 titles film titles available to stream on Netflix and probably, in total, no more than 7,000 or 8,000 to stream across all of the services.
For collectors who love cinema, and I’m not just talking about the extreme cinephiles, I’m talking about film lovers who recognize the fact that physical media is a way for them to have the films that they love in the best possible versions — we release in 4K UHD — and have them forever. Those little plastic discs will probably outlive all of us. So we’ve cultivated those customers and they sustain our business, even as we recognize the deterioration of that business on a macro level. It’s a curated approach, a targeted approach, but there are many, many really good titles out there, even with the strictest curation standards. Films that really deserve to be made available again.
I’ve heard you say that DVD is the new vinyl, that physical media is set for a revival. Where do you see evidence of that?
You’re using DVD generically, of course, but what we’re really talking about is the newest standard, which is 4K UHD. You won’t see anything in as good a quality as you can see on a 4K UHD copy now. And it allows for including a range of material beyond what you could put on a DVD or even a Blu-ray. It is going to become the collectible of record. People who really care about preserving their own cultural collections are going to be embracing 4K. We heard that at the Oscars. I had a great chat with Christopher Nolan, who has been a big champion of physical media. He loves our stuff and maybe we’ll do some things with him from his library, but he’s embraced the physical media business. [Quentin] Tarantino was certainly one of them who raves about the importance of preserving cinema culture in physical media. Whether the comparison with vinyl is exactly on target or not, it’s close enough.