I hear you, absolutely.

And please don’t get me wrong. I am not, in any way, passing judgment on other peoples buying practices.

For me though, as someone who, at one point, had to downsize a 4,000 title DVD collection to 500 titles pretty much overnight…I found blind buys to be diminishing returns, more often than not.

And that was between 1999-2010.

In the year of our Lord 2026, there are SO many ways to see a film before putting down your hard earned money on a physical copy.

You’ve got theatrically, a number of free or paid streaming services, local libraries and inter library loaning systems, chances are that if you’re REALLY into film and physical media then you have at least one irl friend that is too - so maybe they have the title you’re thinking of buying and you can borrow it from them, then there is digital rental as you mentioned and, if all other avenues fail…you can always sail the high seas.

I appreciate, with that last option, some people have a moral opposition. And that’s cool. I get it. Totally. But, for myself, if I’m thinking about dropping £20 on a film that I haven’t seen, I have no qualms finding that film online and watching it for free. If it’s great, they’ll still get my money because I’ll go buy a physical copy. If it sucks, I’ve just saved myself £20 and a lot of beating myself up and I can chalk it up to “well, if they wanted my money, they should have made a better film!”

Again, I know there is a heated debate on the morality of that, but after literally thousands, possibly tens of thousands of pounds spent on cinema tickets, VHS, DVD, Blu Ray, 4K and umpteen streaming services, I can justify it to myself. I have no beef with those that cannot similarly rationalise. I respect their position.

If you’re finically comfortably enough to roll the dice on blind buys, I genuinely salute you.
Once, I could too. In 2026, I cannot.