I Was Right About Andor. I Still Can't Own It.

I have been a Star Wars fan since 1977, which is to say since there was a Star Wars to be a fan of. I was there for the original release. I have watched the franchise be brilliant and I have watched it be embarrassing, sometimes in the same film, and I have stayed through all of it because that's what being a fan of something for nearly fifty years actually means.

So when they announced Andor, I was excited. Genuinely, uncomplicatedly excited. And as far as I could tell, I was alone.

The reaction everywhere else was a shrug. A whole series built around Cassian Andor, a supporting character from Rogue One, a guy nobody had asked for more of, a spy in a franchise people mostly wanted lightsabers from. The pundits were lukewarm. The fan forums were skeptical. Who is this for, went the general tone. I remember thinking they were all wrong, and I remember being fairly quiet about it, because being the one guy excited for the thing everyone else is meh about is not a position that ages well if you turn out to be wrong.

I did not turn out to be wrong. Andor is some of the best Star Wars ever made, and I mean that against the whole fifty years. The critics came around. The fans came around. It got the reviews and the awards talk and the "actually, this is the good one" essays. I had been right, and everyone else had caught up, and I will admit I enjoyed that more than a grown man probably should.

And then I went to buy it.

Here is where the story stops being fun.

I wanted Andor on my shelf. Not streaming, where it sits at the pleasure of a licensing agreement I've never seen. On a disc, in 4K, the way I own the things that matter to me. Specifically, what I wanted was the obvious thing: a box set with Rogue One and both seasons of Andor together, the complete story in one place, the way the story actually wants to be watched.

That set does not exist. It may never exist.

Season 1 did get a physical release, eventually, a limited collector's steelbook that arrived well over a year after the show aired. "Limited" turned out to be the operative word. Try to find it now at a price that isn't insulting. Season 2, the concluding half of the story, the payoff to everything the first season set up, has no disc at all. None announced. Disney has quietly stopped putting most of its live-action Star Wars and Marvel streaming shows onto physical media, and Andor season 2 landed on the wrong side of that decision.

So the situation is this. One of the best things the franchise has ever produced exists, right now, as a stream I am permitted to watch and half a collector's set I can't reasonably complete. The story has an ending. I am simply not allowed to own it.

I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to make this a rant about one studio, and it isn't one. This is everywhere now.

More than a hundred Netflix originals are leaving that platform across 2026, and the vast majority of them never got a disc in the first place, so when they go, they don't go into some secondary market where a patient collector can hunt them down. They just go. Apple's originals, some of them award winners, have almost no physical footprint. An entire golden age of television and film is being made and then, by default, made unkeepable.

And this is a different problem from the one I usually write about. When an old film disappears from streaming, it stings, but there's a backstop. Somebody owns the disc. It's on a shelf in someone's house, in a used shop, in a library, and access can be lost without the film itself being lost. The disc is the copy of record that no licensing decision can reach.

A streaming original that never gets a disc has no copy of record. There is no backstop, no shelf it's hiding on, no version you can go and buy if you're willing to look hard enough. When the license lapses or the platform decides it's not worth hosting, the thing doesn't just leave your library. It leaves everyone's. At any price. In any form. It becomes something that was made, and watched, and loved, and is now simply gone.

The part that gets me, with Andor specifically, is what the show is actually about.

Andor is a story about resistance to an authority that wants to control the record. It's about how power erases what's inconvenient, rewrites what happened, and decides on your behalf what you're allowed to remember. It is, more than almost anything else in the franchise, a show about the value of the things worth preserving and the cost of letting them be taken.

And I can't put it on my shelf. The story about not letting the record be controlled is itself a piece of the record I'm not permitted to own, because the company that made it has decided that's not on offer. I don't think anyone at Disney intended that irony. It's there anyway.

I was right about Andor. I said it was going to be great when everyone else shrugged, and it was great, and I got to be a little smug about it. But being right about a film or a series, it turns out, has nothing to do with being able to keep it. A thing can be brilliant, beloved, vindicated, essential, and still be something you're not allowed to own, because that decision was never yours to make. It belongs to whoever holds the license, and they can decide the answer is no, and there is nothing your good taste can do about it.

I'd trade being right for a box set. I don't get to choose that either.

I built Arkiv to keep track of the physical film and TV collection you're able to build, and one quiet thing it does is show you the gaps, the things you meant to own and don't. Some of those gaps you can still fill. Some, like a certain box set that doesn't exist, you can't, which is the whole argument for grabbing the disc while it's actually on the shelf. There are also a few genuinely fun things to uncover as your collection grows, which tend to surprise people who thought they were just making a list.