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A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a Winnipeg man is hoping his massive movie collection can pull in $1 million.

Adam Malik, 36, has posted his collection — which includes more than 17,300 movies — on eBay.

Walking through the floor-to-ceiling shelves, packed with DVDs, Blu-ray, Laserdiscs, VHS and Betamax tapes, in the basement of his Winnipeg home, Malik points to the movie that started it all — Jurassic Park.

"I have 23 copies of Jurassic Park," he said.

"It's my favourite movie so I bought all the different versions of it from England, Germany, all the different special editions over the years. I just keep buying new ones and all the formats: VHS, DVD, Blu-ray."

The first movie came as a gift 25 years ago, when Malik was 11 years old. After that, he started searching video stores, pawn shops, flea markets and anywhere he could get his hands on a movie.

Now, 500 square feet of his house are filled with movies and television shows, from The Godfather to Die Hard to the latest Superman movie, with a lot of other films and shows in between.

He's not particular about genre, but special collections catch his eye.

Adam Malik's collection includes more than 17,300 movies, stored in about 500 square feet of his house. (Trevor Brine/CBC)

Malik proudly pointed to the multiple shelves holding his other prized possessions: the movies from the Criterion Collection. Criterion specializes in special editions of important classic and contemporary films — a must-have item for any cinephile.

"They are typically very expensive. Some of them go out of print and it makes them very hard to find and very expensive and valuable," Malik said.

"I have just over 500 of those. Those would probably be the creme de la creme, if you will."

Malik smiled broadly talking about the collection, stored in alphabetical order (chronological if it's a series), but he said it was time to slash it down to a more modest number. He said that means leaving only 500 movies in his personal collection.

The collection was initially posted on eBay in August, and according to the website it has had 45 offers. Malik said he's being realistic that the collection, which he is calling the largest in the world, might not garner a million-dollar bid, but he remains hopeful.

"I've had as little as $1. I don't really want to say what the most was, but it still wasn't enough," Malik said.

"I get the compliment from how much people love to see the collection and appreciate what I have, to people who think I'm insane. Some nice, some not very nice, some straight up rude."

There have been more than a few people asking if Malik's girlfriend was behind the move, but, with a laugh, he insisted it was voluntary.

If he does find the perfect buyer — ideally someone who loves movies more than he does — Malik said he will come to terms with pulling the plug on his epic collection.

"[There] may be a little post-partum depression," he said.

"I'll get over it I think, the money hopefully will help."

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If he's expecting a million dollars I think he'll be disappointed -- that's almost $60 for each item in his collection.
 

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Posted by Martin McCaffery (Member # 37) on 10-03-2017, 01:29 PM:
 
It's not a collection, it's an accumulation
 

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Posted by Marcel Birgelen (Member # 6801) on 10-03-2017, 02:10 PM:
 
I don't know if it's an indication, but I recently bought 50 (yes fifty) Blu-Rays on Ebay for EUR 50 including shipping, which is somewhere around USD 60 at the current exchange rate.

To be fair, it was an auction without reserve. I guess somebody was cleaning his/her basement...
 

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Posted by Mark J. Marshall (Member # 1409) on 10-03-2017, 03:24 PM:
 
Who needs 23 copies of Jurassic Park?

And I'm sorry - no 35mm?

He didn't get them all.
 

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Posted by Alexandre Pereira (Member # 9295) on 10-03-2017, 04:09 PM:
 
All of it promptly into the dumpster if it is NOT 35mm.
 

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Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 10-03-2017, 05:52 PM:
 
I'd be surprised if he does find someone who is willing to pay serious money for those videos.

The thing that motivates compulsive collectors is the desire to build their collections themselves, looking for this elusive title here or that rarity there. Simply buying an enormous collection in one fell swoop takes the fun out of it. Very few collect indiscriminately, which is effectively what you'd be doing by buying this lot.

Furthermore, with media of that sort, 99.99% of them are essentially worthless. I have a (relatively small) collection of about 1,500 classical, jazz and spoken word phonograph records dating from 1898 to the present day. Seven of them are worth all the others put together.
 

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Posted by Scott Norwood (Member # 30) on 10-03-2017, 06:34 PM:
 
I like movies, too, but...really...why? He has enough to watch one every day for forty-seven years. That is more than my expected lifespan.
 

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Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 10-03-2017, 07:08 PM:
 
The magpie instinct, I guess. It would be interesting to see if any psychology researcher has looked into what motivates compulsive collectors.

A desire for completeness is certainly part of it: you want a copy of every movie with a certain actor in it, for example. One of my seven seriously valuable records is completely unremarkable in terms of its technical and aesthetic characteristics. The reason that copies of the that pressing go for the high three / low four figures on Ebay is that is an early performance by someone who later became seriously famous, only 150 copies were ever pressed, and there are obsessive fans of this performer out there who just feel the need to have everything she recorded, and who have everything except that. Ironically, I bought my copy in a thrift store in the 1990s for pennies, when vinyl (and shellac, which is what the record in question is actually made of) was being thrown into dumpsters by the ton.

Whenever I contemplate buying a book or a record now, the test I apply is, "Am I likely to read/listen to this more than once?" If I can't honestly answer yes to myself, I try to exercise the self-discipline not to buy it. I like sitting in front of a pair of loudspeakers, but there is a lot more to life than that.

It is sometimes joked that the "first law of archiving" is that 5% of a given collection is the subject of 95% of that collection's access activity. That's certainly true of mine.
 

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Posted by Justin Hamaker (Member # 2165) on 10-03-2017, 07:56 PM:
 
It certainly would not be interested in the collection. I already have something like 150 DVDs, and most of them have sat on a shelf untouched for years. Now says the main movies I buy are 4K Blu-ray, and only for movies I know I'll watch more than once. A handful of favorite movies have been upgraded from VHS to DVD, and now to Blu-Ray. And now that I have blu-ray I have a hard time watching any of the regular DVDs, and definitely not a VHS.
 

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Posted by Marcel Birgelen (Member # 6801) on 10-03-2017, 08:15 PM:
 
I think it's about a year ago I actually dug out the SONY SVP-5600P to capture a VHS tape. When you look at that picture nowadays, you can really see where we're coming from, a time where cinema really was seemingly light-years ahead of consumer video...
 

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Posted by Frank B. McLaughlin (Member # 6683) on 10-04-2017, 11:43 AM:
 
. . . and, sad to say, the way things are going our large screen home theaters are becoming superior in quality and presentation to most chain "theaters."
 

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Posted by Mark Ogden (Member # 43) on 10-04-2017, 06:54 PM:
 
This reminded me of a fellow I once knew who collected 16 and 35mm film prints. He was really heavily into it and bought, sold and traded, and he had an ad every month in The Big Reel back in the day.

One day he told me that he was going to firesale everything, get rid off all his prints. "I going to get into the NEXT big thing!" he told me.

"What's that?" I asked.

"Laserdiscs!" he said.

I've often wondered what became of his investment.
 

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Posted by Alexandre Pereira (Member # 9295) on 10-04-2017, 09:26 PM:
 
""Laserdiscs!" he said."

Cautionary tale.
 

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Posted by Monte L Fullmer (Member # 2797) on 10-28-2017, 02:32 PM:
 

quote: Frank B. McLaughlin

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the way things are going our large screen home theaters are becoming superior in quality and presentation to most chain "theaters."

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Why you got ATMOS and Barco Auro multichannel systems now ... just to stay that one step ahead of the game.
 

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Posted by Martin Brooks (Member # 1269) on 11-04-2017, 02:10 AM:
 
This collector is dreaming. Almost no one would care about anything except the Blu-rays. Maybe some collectors of Laserdiscs will care about those if they still have a working player, And buying in quantity, most people wouldn't want to pay more than $5 for most and let's say $12 for the Criterion's, assuming those are all Blu, which is doubtful. And let's assume overall, 5000 titles are Blu (although I suspect it's probably less). That's about $28,500. And he won't even get that.

I've read about several instances of vinyl collectors with enormous collections who also wanted to get rid of them and in spite of all the hype about vinyl, there were no takers. The collections are too large and too expensive for just about anyone to absorb.
 

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Posted by Randy Stankey (Member # 64) on 11-04-2017, 08:42 AM:
 
Anything on VHS or Betamax is worthless or less than worthless.

Video tape is a dinosaur format. Unless you have a professional quality player for those tapes, they are unwatchable. Even then, the shelf life of video tape is short.

What is the shelf life of video tape stored under non-archival conditions? Something like 10 or 20 years? I forget, exactly.

Even if you had a good player, the quality of video tape never was very good, especially compared to digital formats. Once the video tape has degraded, which it likely has, the quality is likely even crappier.

I don't even know if the plastic that video tapes are made from is recyclable. Even then, how are you going to sell them as scrap plastic? Nobody would buy it. You'd probably have a tough time paying somebody to take it off your hands.

I'd say that the only place to put these tapes would be the landfill but, these days, depending on your locale, you might not even be allowed to put that much plastic into a landfill.

These days, a collection like that might be considered to be worth less than junk.
 

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Posted by Martin McCaffery (Member # 37) on 11-04-2017, 03:59 PM:
 
I'm sure there's someone somewhere that wants them for an art project
 

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Posted by Jesse Skeen (Member # 586) on 11-10-2017, 01:02 AM:
 
My oldest tapes are approaching 40 years and the ones I've checked still play like new!
 

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Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 11-10-2017, 08:02 AM:
 

quote: Randy Stankey

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Anything on VHS or Betamax is worthless or less than worthless.

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quote: Leo Enticknap

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a far longer version of The Wicker Man than the theatrical cut was aired by the BBC a few times during the 1980s. Off-air VHS copies was the only way to see it, until the 2" quad tapes were used to produce a DVD rerelease about ten years ago. No film elements of the deleted scenes are known to survive.

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quote: Leo Enticknap

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Also, very occasionally, a broadcaster will air a version of a feature film that is substantially different, more complete or less censored than the one in common circulation.

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quote: Leo Enticknap

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Off air recordings, especially as old as from the '70s or '80s, where the machine was allowed to run for the entire length of a two or three-hour tape, are actually quite sought after by some archivists, especially if they are of smaller and lesser known broadcasters (e.g. local and regional).

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