It can be tricky to settle on the best methodology for developing a library’s media collection. After all, what metrics are reliable enough to ensure that you’re procuring the best selection for your community? No matter what approach you take, usage data will always be important to reference, even when it shows that the films your community wants to watch are not actually the best films.
Every January, the movie rental company RedBox publishes its best-performing titles from the previous year. The list is split into two categories, films rented at the physical kiosk and films rented on demand. 2021’s most-rented films are led by The Croods: A New Age at the kiosk, and Free Guy in the on-demand section. Many of the entries in the list will be no surprise––after all, it shouldn’t exactly be a shock that some of the year’s highest-grossing films (Free Guy, F9, etc.) also show up as top rentals. But look further down the list and you might be puzzled: Wrath of Man? Wonder Woman 1984? Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard? Why are these movies getting rented more frequently than any other?
It can be hard to define any single characteristic that the films share, as they are pretty evenly varied across genre, target demographic, and setting (although the prevalence of action-heavy films is worth noting). You may think to yourself, why are these the best-sellers? These aren’t the most overwhelmingly popular movies, nor are they the best reviewed or the ones that generated the most awards buzz. So what is it?
The somewhat subjective and pedestrian common thread for most of these films, I think, is that they are pretty good. The rental market is where mediocre movies get to shine. You don’t rent your favorite film, you buy it; you rent the film that you didn’t catch in theaters but your friend said was actually pretty decent. These are films that people were interested in seeing, but not so attached to that they absolutely had to rush out to buy copies for themselves. These films are not groundbreaking works of art, but they’re good enough to be entertaining for an evening, and that’s precisely why they’re the ones that get rented.
Media libraries, of course, are not the same things as commercial rental businesses, and RedBox’s data does not have equivalent value to actual library usage data. However, there is an undeniable similarity in the temporary nature of renting a movie to borrowing a movie from a library. A resourceful media librarian can and should take RedBox’s list as an example of national viewership trends, and look for the lessons contained therein. Many of these movies might seem slight or inessential, but that itself is the lesson.
This leads to a somewhat paradoxical conclusion: sometimes, the most important films to have in your collection are the films that are, by most measurements, the least significant. The films that people want to rent or borrow are not the same films that people want to buy, and so expendability becomes a counterintuitively desirable quality when developing your library’s DVD or streaming collection. It can be easy to think that the most popular films are the ones critics love and the ones that make the most money at the box office, but those are not the only metrics of popularity. Arguably, the rental industry is more translatable to the purview of media libraries, and so its data should be taken into consideration just like other metrics.
Not every film in your local library’s media collection can or should be the pinnacle of its genre. As RedBox shows, people want to rent or borrow films that they are merely curious about, not always the ones that they’re wildly passionate about. So if you’re having trouble getting patrons to use your DVD section, consider adding a few good-but-not-great options for people to peruse. They might just do as well as the films on RedBox’s year-end list!