Blu-ray Is Making a Comeback in the UK, and the 2025 Figures Back It Up

I bought my first 4K disc almost by accident. A steelbook of a film I loved was sitting on a shelf, and I couldn’t talk myself out of it. Three years on, my collection is getting slightly out of hand, and it turns out I’m not the odd one out. For years the line was that discs were finished, killed off by streaming. The shops I buy from, the people I follow, and now the sales figures all say something different.

Blu-ray sales are up in the UK, and the 2025 figures back it up

The numbers are the part that got me. In 2025, UK sales of physical video, meaning DVD and Blu-ray together, fell by just 4.7 percent, according to the Entertainment Retailers Association. That doesn’t sound like much of a comeback until you learn it’s the slowest drop since 2010. Blu-ray, with 4K UHD included, has now passed DVD as the biggest physical format in the country, worth £84.2 million against £64.7 million. And the 4K side, which is where most of my money goes, was up 19.5 percent on the year, according to BASE, the British Association for Screen Entertainment. A format people keep writing off has grown. That still feels odd to type.

Why film fans are buying discs again

Ask anyone who’s drifted back to buying films and you’ll hear the same handful of reasons. Streaming keeps getting pricier. The catalogues keep splitting up, so the film you fancy on a Friday is on a service you don’t pay for, or it was there last month and now it’s gone. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve sat down to rewatch something and found it had disappeared.

Then there’s the thing that finally got me. I paid for films on a digital store years ago that I don’t own anymore, because the licences lapsed or the service shut down. That isn’t really buying. A disc doesn’t care whether the company that made it still exists. It’ll play in ten years. For me that settled it, and plenty of other people have ended up in the same place.

It’s about the object, not just the film

There’s a side to this that streaming can’t copy, and it’s the disc itself. Special editions have grown into their own little economy. BASE reckoned around one in ten 4K releases last year came in a steelbook, and at roughly £32 each, those pricier editions brought in close to £2 of every £10 spent on 4K. I’m the exact sucker that figure is describing. I’ve bought the same film twice, once on a plain disc and again for the nicer case, which I know is daft.

Older films matter more than you’d think, too. The 4K Lord of the Rings trilogy sold 13,800 copies for £804,000, which tells you people will gladly pay to own the films they love in proper quality, not just stream them once and move on. Labels like Criterion, Arrow and Second Sight have built whole followings this way, taking old films, restoring them, and making them worth owning.

Blu-ray and DVD prices are all over the place

If one thing trips up new buyers, it’s how random the pricing is. The same Blu-ray can be £16 in one shop and £25 in another on the same day, and it’s worse on limited runs and pre-orders. Supermarkets go cheap on the big new releases, HMV and the specialist shops carry the back catalogue and the boutique titles, and Amazon’s price on a single disc can swing by a fiver from one week to the next for reasons I’ve never worked out.

So these days I check what something’s going for in a few places before I buy it. A comparison site like Compiral does that for UK buyers, lining up the price of the same Blu-ray or DVD across different shops so you can see where it’s cheapest before you spend anything. When you’re building a collection, those gaps add up. Paying £24.99 for a disc that’s £16.99 a couple of clicks away stops being funny once you’ve got a hundred of them. Checking first, instead of buying from wherever comes to mind, is the simplest way to keep the whole thing affordable.

DVD isn’t dead either

It’s easy to get caught up in 4K and forget that plain DVD is still shifting serious numbers. The best-selling DVD of 2025 was Downton Abbey: The Finale, which sold 56,000 copies in December alone. DVD’s cheap, it plays on anything, and it’s still how most casual buyers and younger collectors get started. Even Tesco, which dropped discs entirely a few years back, has started stocking them again, and HMV has said its 4K and Blu-ray are selling particularly well. Supermarkets don’t reverse a call like that on a hunch.

Is it worth starting a Blu-ray collection?

I’m not going to pretend discs are about to overtake streaming, because they aren’t, and most of us use both anyway. But the mood has shifted. A few years ago the whole conversation was about how quickly physical media was dying. Now it’s about which editions are worth buying and where to find them without overpaying. If you’re a film fan who wants to own what you watch, in the best quality, without it vanishing on you, it’s a good time to start. The one skill worth picking up is buying well, so the shelf grows faster than the regret does.