Hitherto confined to modest prices, for those who managed to sell them, the market for second-hand video cassettes has taken off in recent months, a blow of heat attributed to nostalgia but also to the appetite of investors for new investments. During the same sale, organized at the beginning of June by Heritage Auctions, a VHS tape of Back to the future was sold for 75,000 dollars, while a copy of Jaws went for 32,500 dollars, and another by Rambo for $22,500. Cassettes have had their circle of collectors since the first copies were released in the late 1970s, but today, for almost all of them, “VHS are not worth almost nothing”, says John, a resident of Newmarket (Canada), who says he has sold around 3,000 in more than twenty years. “You’ll be lucky if you make $5 out of it.” Only certain confidential horror films, or feature films available only on this medium, have so far managed to do better, going up to a few hundred dollars , or even above a thousand. But now it’s blockbusters that are on the rise, especially the big hits from the first half of the 1980s, provided the tapes meet certain criteria. market, in its original unopened packaging, will be of greater interest, as will a special series produced in small numbers, which automatically excludes most of the existing stock, in particular the funds of former video rental companies. Star Wars, released in theaters in 1977, the year in which the first video cassettes were marketed in the United States, is a current benchmark and has already seen several sales exceed $10,000. The grail would be a copy taken from the very first American VHS delivery, namely the films MASH, Patton and The Sound of Music, released in 1977 by the 20th Century Fox studio and Magnetic Video. The price? “It’s really hard to say. I would say a six-digit number, or even seven,” said Jay Carlson, director of the VHS business at Heritage Auctions, a position created only a few months ago. “A special object” Many, including among collectors of for a long time, the question of the sudden acceleration of this market has been raised, sixteen years after the last release of a film in this format (A History of Violence), video recorders having not been produced since 2016. Philip Baker, who runs the Video Collector site, says: “I think it has a lot to do with nostalgia. […] What makes VHS special is that it was the first accessible way to watch a film at home.”Pat Contri, who co-hosts the Completely Unnecessary podcast, sees a parallel in this movement with video games. Long-time collectors have been superimposed “people who have just decided to get into it. They said to themselves: ‘I have money, let’s invest in it’”. it’s sneakers, video games, or, now, video cassettes. For a new generation of collectors sensitive to their cultural value, these items have replaced stamps or coins. Dedicated Facebook groups, multiplication of rating services, which evaluate the authenticity and quality of a cassette, auction houses on the go, the collectible VHS industry is structuring at great speed V. Pat Contri is wary of this organized fever. “It’s similar to what’s happened in the video game market,” he says, “where instead of letting a hobby develop naturally, you try to instill a fear of missing out. ” and miss an opportunity to make a juicy investment. “There are people who collect open cassettes [déjà utilisées, ndlr] and who are very skeptical of those who are on the [exemplaires encore emballés, ndlr]“, recognizes Jay Carlson, “but I think that [ce mouvement, ndlr] is a good thing. […] It’s just a different way of collecting.” For him, the market potential of video cassettes is greater than that of video games, which saw two sales exceed one million dollars last year. “I know a lot of people who aren’t into video games,” he says, “but I don’t know a lot of people who don’t have a favorite movie.”
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