VHS Tapes That Are Still Worth a Lot of Money

A couple of decades ago “streaming” meant something water did in a small river. Back then, you didn’t watching movies on streaming; no one had even conceived of such a thing. If you wanted to watch a movie, you went to a theater — or if you were too lazy to do that, you watched it on television, mostly likely in pan-and-scan format that cropped out half the picture and looked like low-definition garbage and was interrupted every 15 minutes by ads for Hefty bags and Bufferin.

If you wanted to watch a movie at home on your own schedule, you needed to take a trip trip to a video store, either to buy or rent a VHS tape — short for “video home system.” Although VHS eventually gave way to DVD and Blu-ray, and now streaming, several generations of cinephiles who were raised on home video remain extremely nostalgic for it. And now that they’re older and have a little money of their own, they’ve started collecting VHS tapes the way our parents became obsessed with old baseball cards or comic books.

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Like any other collectible, an old VHS tape is only worth someone is willing to pay for it. So the list of 25 valuable VHS tapes below are based on recent sales on eBay — with best offer prices found, in some cases, on the website 130point.com. Which is to say that someone did pay a lot of money for these cassette tapes, streaming be damned.