Hollywood Video / Movie Gallery

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

~ the last words ~

hollywood video did not reach turkey at any scale. the chain was a 1990s and 2000s american weekend ritual the way blockbuster was, with a yellow-and-purple sign instead of blue-and-yellow, and a hollywood-and-vine signage gimmick out front of each store. in ankara at the time the video rental was the local apartment-block kiosk with vhs covers taped to a plastic sleeve on the glass and a turkish-dubbed copy of indiana jones sharing a shelf with a faded rambo iii. i learned about the hollywood video collapse years later, from american retail-death writeups in the 2020s.

mark wattles opened the first hollywood video store in portland oregon in june 1988, three years after blockbuster's first dallas store. honestly, the format was a copy of blockbuster's superstore footprint, with a deeper catalog focus and a slightly more upmarket lighting choice. by 1993 the chain was 21 stores and was publicly listed on nasdaq the following year. the rollup ran fast through the 90s, with the company at 800 stores by 1999 and around 1,900 at the 2002 peak.

i was not really paying attention through any of this, but anyway, the second player in the us video-rental market was the more vulnerable position even before streaming. blockbuster could absorb a year of late-fee softness and hollywood could not. wattles had cashed out of the company in 2005 and movie gallery, a chain of about 2,500 small-town stores run out of dothan alabama by joe malugen, paid 860 million for the merger. movie gallery added 380 million in assumed debt on top of its own pre-existing 870 million.

the first chapter 11 came in october 2007 with about 1.4 billion in debt. the company emerged in may 2008 with a debt-for-equity swap that left the lenders holding the equity and the original common shareholders wiped out. malugen stayed on as ceo. through 2008 and 2009 netflix added subscribers faster than the chain could close stores, and the redbox kiosks at the front of every supermarket peeled off the last casual-renter category.

i pretty much only knew the end from the press, the way most non-americans did. the second chapter 11 came on february 2 2010 with about 600 million in remaining debt. on april 30 the court approved a chapter 7 conversion and the liquidation auctions started across the country. the last hollywood video doors closed in the us on july 31 2010, the last movie gallery in canada eight days later. the websites lingered as catalog pages for a few months before going to landing-page mode.

~ the record ~

~ the format ~

the hollywood video store was about 7,500 square feet, with new releases on the front wall and the older catalog organized by genre across the back. in those days. the "guaranteed in stock" promise was the brand differentiation against blockbuster, with the store paying the customer five dollars off the next rental if the new release was out. honestly, that worked while the catalog could be sourced quickly. by the late 2000s the same promise was the company's largest unfunded liability against a shrinking rental window.

the loyalty program was called the movie value pass and it was the closest thing the chain had to a direct line to its customers. the database from that program survived the chapter 7 and was bought by a marketing firm in 2010, which is the version of the hollywood video customer relationship that outlived the stores themselves.

~ the long tail ~

the hollywoodvideo.com domain still loads in 2026 as an entertainment news blog that has nothing to do with the rental chain. the brand name was bought out of the chapter 7 estate in 2012 by a domain-portfolio operator and has been used as a celebrity-gossip site since. the movie gallery domain is parked.

mark wattles spent the years after his 2005 exit running a smaller investment company in oregon and got back into video retail briefly with an attempted hollywood video relaunch in 2010 that fell apart inside three months. joe malugen kept a much lower profile and dothan alabama lost its largest non-agricultural employer when the headquarters wound down through 2010.

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