There was once a time when “straight-to-VHS” was a slur, code for largely terrible bargain bucket movies made for next to nothing yet sporting wildly-overpromising covers. Today, it’s not even a thing. VHS tapes were replaced by DVDs and eventually streaming. The last VCR player was made in 2016. Most machines lie broken, covered in dust or already long-since sent to scrap heaps.
But one filmmaker is bringing “straight-to-VHS” back and hoping to give it a makeover for the digital era.
“This is How the World Ends” — a low-budget sci-fi adventure about a brother who sets out to find his sister at a hedonistic party deep in the desert dubbed the “last party on earth” — is, according to South African director Robert dos Santos, the first straight-to-VHS release in 20 years.
“The concept for us was: what does VHS in 2026 look like and how can this be a new reimagining of what ‘straight-to-VHS’ means,” dos Santos tells Variety. “It used to be proper slander, if someone said ‘straight-to-VHS,’ it meant terrible. But the whole point of this is to reclaim that and say, look, straight-to-VHS is actually saying that this is a well-made film, made with intention for an audience.”
That VCR-owning audience is, of course, limited. But not quite as limited as first thought by dos Santos, a former lawyer who switched to film after being held at gunpoint multiple times in South Africa and realizing “I’m going to die, so I can die chained to a desk, unhappy, or just accept who I am and seize the moment.”
Launching in time for National VCR Day (June 7, for those who weren’t aware), physical copies of “This is How the World Ends” — which was mostly shot in AfrikaBurn, South Africa’s equivalent of Burning Man — are soon be shipped out by dos Santos’ production company And Films. And pre-orders from around the world have already surpassed 1,000 copies.
“That far exceeds what we thought,” says dos Santos, who claims there was never the intention “to be making bank” on the film.
But he now has boutique physical media specialists VHS Haven in the U.S. on board to distribute the film in the U.S. and, following promising meetings in Cannes (most notably with Neon and AMC), there’s also hopes to eventually get “This is How the World Ends” into cinemas. A theatrical release — following its launch on VHS — would of course be a complete reversal of a traditional model that’s already now wildly outdated, but it’s something dos Santas asserts hasn’t put off too many of the industry execs he’s met.
“Sure, you’re if going to a sales agent and you’re like: ‘Hey, here’s our film. Sorry, but we’ve actually already released it on VHS and DVD,’ they might not get it, so in a way it’s like shooting ourselves in the foot,” he says. “But actually some think it’s cool, because we’re building an audience — we’re building a group of people who say: we like what these filmmakers are doing, they like organic filmmaking, they like the process of filmmaking as much as the final product.”
“This is How the World Ends”
“This is How the World Ends” arrives amid the dual box office phenomenons of “Obsession” and “Backrooms,” both from YouTube creators who arrived in cinemas already with sizeable followings.
“They built an audience,” says dos Santos. “Obviously, that’s in a totally different theater, but I think what you’re seeing is filmmakers saying that the traditional route isn’t necessarily working for us.”
Of course, the “first straight-to-VHS in 20 years” tag also adds a certain novelty to “This is How the World Ends” that helps grab some much-needed attention. But dos Santos asserts that that chief reasoning for such an unorthodox approach — which came to him last year while in the edit — is actually a “deliberate middle finger” to the growing encroach of AI.
“This is a film that is made by humans, for humans — this is cinema you can hold, touch, and most importantly own,” he says, adding that he was “upset with every headline being ‘Hollywood is cooked,’ ‘Hollywood is over,’ ‘Filmmaking is dead,’ and wanted to say, ‘It’s not, there are people like myself who really care about cinema, who really care about filmmaking.”
“This is How the World Ends” itself has AI at its centre, set towards the end of a war between humans and the AI Machine States that humans don’t look like winning.
“What I realized while making this is that there’s a very organic part to being a human and to being a creative and to being someone who wants to tell stories and someone who wants to hopefully impart lessons through stories,” he says. “There’s an organic process to that, and AI is taking away that organic process. The existential threat in this film is AI. AI is in the background slowly taking over the world. And that’s how I feel as a creative.”
And as someone who made a dramatic career swift to dive into filmmaking and creativity, dos Santos says he’s been dismayed to suddenly be told that, thanks to AI, he “can just push a button” to have it all done for him.
“So I wanted to make a statement and release this in a way that says, this is organic, this is real, you can touch it, you can feel it,” he says. “I want other filmmakers or other people who believe in film and believe in stories to be able to say, ‘I own this film’ and for people to come over and say, ‘Hey, what’s that?’. And you can’t do that with a Netflix subscription.”
