What year is it?! Blockbuster may soon have plans to urge its followers to be kind and rewind, as their official website has gone live yet again and their Twitter account has awoken from its slumber.
The official Blockbuster site now has a homepage featuring an image of their iconic logo, along with the text “WE ARE WORKING ON REWINDING YOUR MOVIE.” As per the Wayback Machine, the website has had this look a number of times in the past. However, since Blockbuster also posted on Twitter just this week, one might wonder if the company (whose parent company is now Dish Network) is looking to take another go at the market…or partake in another venture altogether. (Their Twitter account, like many other brands’, typically posts jokes and one-liners.)
Blockbuster once had over 9,000 stores around the world. In 2010, they filed for bankruptcy, a massive fall since first opening in 1985. As of 2023, there is only one Blockbuster store remaining, the famed location in Bend, Oregon. That store has become a tourist destination for the nostalgic, with a fun documentary called The Last Blockbuster and even once hosting a sleepover that would let you relive your nights of action movies, endless popcorn and whatever the hell is stuck on the carpet.
Nostalgia for Blockbuster does indeed seem to be steady. But, in a way, it feels a bit manufactured–which is a fraction of the reason Netflix’s namesake series only lasted one season. After all, weren’t so many of us outraged when Blockbuster started strong-arming the mom and pop video stores? So what did we really miss about Blockbuster other than browsing the aisles, which we could do at our local shops? OK, maybe it smelled a little different…
Whether you loved Blockbuster or not, the teaser on the website and resurrection of the Twitter account is enough to get people wondering what, if anything, they might be up to.
What do you think Blockbuster has going on? Do you think video rental could even work on such a large scale ever again? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below!
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