Blockbuster Video Opened On This Day in 1985

On October 19, 1985, the first Blockbuster Video store opened, marking the beginning of a period of dominance in the home entertainment market that would last twenty years and reshape the way Americans thought about movies.

Earlier this year, the final Blockbuster stores in Alaska closed, leaving only a single store remaining: the Blockbuster in Bend, Oregon.

"It started last year, and there were still a dozen or so Blockbuster locations left," documentary filmmaker Taylor Morden said during production of his film The Last Blockbuster. "We started filming this thing and I thought, 'It's a cool story, there's not many of these stores left, and we'll maybe start watching as one by one they start closing.' And that did happen and then it got sprung on us that the one here in Bend, Orgeon, where we live, is going to be the very last one left, and that gave us a sense of urgency and a renewed sense that this was going to be a great story. Yeah, we were already working on it, but the story has changed since then."

The Last Blockbuster is currently in production, with an eye toward a release in May of 2019.

Despite being all but extinct for almost ten years, Blockbuster was a big enough presence in the pop culture world that fans went nuts when the trailer for Captain Marvel featured her dropping through the ceiling of a Blockbuster late at night and checking out the racks of VHS tapes on display.

"In all of our interviews, one thing that has become clear is that it wasn't the movie you rented, it was renting the movie," Morden said during an interview for the Emerald City Video Podcast, which you can hear above.

Blockbuster Video at its peak had over 9000 stores, and according to the crowdfunding site for Morden's film, in 1989 a new store opened every 17 hours.

Blockbuster was a monolith in the home entertainment business, and while there were other chains -- including Movie Gallery, Hollywood Video, and the still-existing Family Video -- it was Blockbuster that set the pace for the home video rental industry for years.

Blockbuster also gets credited for popularizing the all-for-one pricing with their MoviePass program, which allowed customers to pay a monthly fee to have a certain number of movies out at any given time with no late fees.

Ultimately, it was the increasing popularity of digital movies, streaming, and services like Netflix that did Blockbuster in. The video stores which still exist, including Blockbuster in Bend, do so in part by focusing on customer service, selection, and other ways big streaming companies have a harder time competing.