“Opening the Vault” examines the renewed currency of the film library—or a catalog of existing content—during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the production of new motion pictures came to a halt, and subscription-based streaming services such as Netflix, Disney+, and Mubi unleashed a copyright war to obtain the licensing of film titles which they subsequently reissued on their home video platforms. In the process, these non-theatrical distributors and exhibitors augmented the value of their vaults while solidifying their position as principal gatekeepers of the circulation of moving images. This essay is part of a new edited collection on "Pandemic Media: Notes Toward a Preliminary Inventory," which was published in open-access with Meson Press in October 2020. Verheul's chapter reorients the study of global screen cultures away from the production of new content or its exhibition in theatrical screening spaces and toward an understanding of the film library as a primary site of our engagement with pandemic media. With its unprecedented scale and consequences the COVID-19 pandemic has generated a variety of new configurations of media. Responding to demands for information, synchronization, regulation, and containment, these “pandemic media” reorder social interactions, spaces, and temporalities, thus contributing to a reconfiguration of media technologies and the cultures and polities with which they are entangled. Highlighting media’s adaptability, malleability, and scalability under the conditions of a pandemic, the contributions to the volume on "Pandemic Media" track and analyze how media emerge, operate, and change in response to the global crisis and provide elements towards an understanding of the post-pandemic world to come.