Hacker Cinema
The Last Blockbuster
2020 · Film · documentary · 86 min
Directed by Taylor Morden
Sandi Hardingm, the manager of the world's last remaining Blockbuster - located in Bend, OR, reflects on the store's vibrant past and navigates the difficult task of keeping a video rental store open in the era of streaming.
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2 comments on Hacker News
I think that Dish doesn't want to sell the rights, at least not for a small sum. In the documentary "The Last Blockbuster", they discuss how the rights to continue to use the name for the store are renegotiated every X amount of years (I think it's 3?) and that if the deal doesn't go through that it's essentially the end of the store.
>It was pretty crazy though when movies were like $99 on VHS.
Yes! They touched on this in the Netflix documentary The Last Blockbuster[1], where an old exec claims that any video copy displaced a huge number of movie viewings, so they came up with a high price to charge for them.
It showed a picture of The Empire Strikes Back with a $99 price tag, which, if you assume it was 1982, would be like $290 today.[2]
According to the documentary, that only changed after someone bought the (expensive) videos and started renting them out, which led to a court case that affirmed the First Sale Doctrine and said you had the right to do that. Then eventually, the video rental stores got the studios to agree to "have all the copies you want, as long as we get a cut of the rental revenues".
[1] About the history of Blockbuster, framed around the last surviving location, a franchisee (in Bend, Oregon) that pays a fee to keep using the brand.
[2] https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/