Collectors Addiction: The Struggle We All Deal With At Some Point

[RustinCohle]

Hi, my names Rustin, and I’m an addict.

For the past ~18 years I’ve been buying blu-rays and for the last ~8 years primarily 4Ks. I started to realize that it was an addiction when more than half my collection was still unopened and I was receiving boxes full of 8-10 movies while I still had two or three unopened boxes also full of 8-10 movies. I was placing preorder after preorder sometimes in excess of $500+ per order.

I felt this need and this compulsion to keep buying. Something kept telling me that I needed to “complete” my collection, but realistically it could never possibly be completed because that would mean I’d have to own every single Blu-ray and 4K disc that has ever come out. I would look at my orders before submitting them online and think to myself “that movie is dumb, I’ll probably never watch it, but it’s part of Shout Factory’s line and I need to complete that..”

I had every single Kino, Criterion, Arrow, Shout, etc. 4K release and the majority were still sealed. I was buying 10x faster than I could watch. I was picking up 4-6 movie per week at stores (when stores still carried them.) My collection was in the thousands and I was watching maybe 3 discs a week on average while a box full of 10 more came in. I had doubles, triples, and occasionally quadruples of releases.

Then I met a new friend at work who also loves movies. We talked collections and he asked me “why do you buy things if you don’t watch them? You need to spend more time watching movies than buying them and managing your collection.” No one ever asked me anything like that before and I thought about it for awhile. I did spend WAAAAY too much time focusing on my collection instead of just watching stuff. I got home and looked at my shelves. I took a step back and thought to myself “which of these movies will I honestly watch again?” and it wasn’t many. I slowly started pulling movies off my shelf under the condition that I had A) already watched it at least twice or B) would definitely rewatch it. If I had never seen it, or if it was one I had seen and wouldn’t rewatch, it stayed on the shelf. This process took WEEKS. Hours and hours of moving movies back on and back off the shelf. Fighting with myself “no you won’t rewatch that…yes you will…no you won’t.”

I ended up with roughly ~500 movies pulled off the shelf as “definite rewatches” with several thousand still left, and that 500 is generous. I probably won’t even rewatch all those 500 again. I started selling. FB Marketplace ended up being my friend. I found a handful of repeat buyers who ended up buying my whole collection (minus the 500) and over the past 6 months or so, took my collection from the thousands down to a solid 500.

This collectors/completionist addiction is real and I’ve seen many others in the same boat. I’ve talked to others that feel the same way. One of my buyers on FB told me he opened up a new credit card to buy a larger portion of my collection. I tried making sure he was okay with this and he said “I actually watch most movies digitally, but I want to have discs just in case.”

I’m not against physical media, but it’s safe to say that I’ll be going from previously buying 300-500 discs per year to now only buying maybe 5-10, and it feels great.

Call 1-800-blu-rays if you also struggle with this addiction.