Blockbuster

» see blockbuster.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

blockbuster never opened a store in turkey. the brand was a 1990s and 2000s american weekend ritual, the saturday afternoon drive to the strip-mall plaza where the new releases sat on the back wall under the cardboard tom cruise standee. i knew the chain from the inside of movies long before i would have known what the inside of a store smelled like. in ankara at that time the video shops were small family operations on the ground floor of apartment buildings, with vhs covers taped to the windows and a turkish-dubbed copy of armageddon on the shelf next to a faded waterworld.

david cook opened the first store on october 19 1985 in dallas, with about 8,000 vhs tapes and 2,000 betamax tapes on the shelves. wayne huizenga, the same guy who had rolled up waste management into a national chain in the 70s, bought into the company in 1987 and treated video stores the same way. by 1992 there were over 3,400 locations. viacom paid 8.4 billion for the whole thing in 1994. the rollup logic stopped working around the time napster appeared.

anyway, the chain peaked in 2004 at 9,094 stores and roughly 84,000 employees. that was already the year netflix had crossed two million subscribers in the mail-order business, with the dvd-by-mail envelope sitting in millions of american mailboxes by the weekend. blockbuster had stopped charging late fees the same year, which removed a 600-million-dollar revenue line and did not stop the customer drain.

chapter 11 came on september 23 2010. dish network bought what was left for 320 million in april 2011 with vague plans to run a streaming service against netflix from the brand. those plans never shipped at scale. between november 6 2013 and january 12 2014 dish closed the last 300 corporate-owned us stores. one franchise store in bend oregon stayed open and is still trading in 2026 as a tourist destination on the old-internet pilgrimage circuit.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the netflix offer ~

in 2000 reed hastings flew to dallas to offer netflix to blockbuster for fifty million dollars. john antioco was running blockbuster. the meeting reportedly lasted twenty minutes. antioco's team passed. the story has been told and re-told enough that everyone in tech repeats the punchline like a campfire moral. the part that gets repeated less is that antioco did eventually push a streaming and a mail-order product at blockbuster in 2004 called total access, which signed up two million subscribers fast and forced netflix to cut prices. the carl icahn-led board pushed antioco out at the end of 2007 over the cost of running total access. his successor james keyes cut the marketing budget on total access and the subscriber lead evaporated.

~ what it was ~

the format was about 4,000 to 8,000 square feet of carpet under fluorescent light, with new releases at the front and the back walls organized by genre. weekends were the load-bearing day. the late-fee model worked because tape was the only home-video format for a decade. dvd shipped in 1997 and the rental window stayed the same but the disc was tougher than a vhs and shipped through the mail without breaking, which is what netflix's qwikster envelope did all of in one move.

~ the long tail ~

the bend oregon store still operates with a working night-drop slot and a faded blue-and-yellow sign. there was an airbnb stunt in 2020 where you could rent the store overnight, and a 2020 netflix sitcom called blockbuster that ran one season. the brand domain blockbuster.com still loads in 2026 with a landing page from dish that has not been touched in years. the new-release wall is gone, but the cardboard tom cruise standee made it into more than one nostalgia documentary on the way out.

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