Blockbuster Video opened in 1985 as a single home video rental shop founded by David Cook, and it grew into a worldwide chain that, at its 2004 peak, employed 84,300 people across 9,094 stores. It offered video game rentals, DVD-by-mail, streaming, video on demand, and even cinema. But for millions of families, it was never really about the square footage or the services. It was Friday night itself: walking the aisles, reading box covers, arguing over the pick, grabbing popcorn on the way out. It was a ritual, and it belonged to everyone who had a membership card.
The decline came from real forces — the Great Recession, poor leadership, and hard competition from Netflix's mail-order and streaming services and Redbox kiosks. Revenue fell through the late 2000s, bankruptcy protection came in 2010, and in 2011 Dish Network bought the remaining 1,700 stores. By November 2013, the brand was discontinued. What went with it was the experience: the shared decision, the browsing, the sense that a night out with a movie started at the store, not on a menu screen.
So we ask — respectfully, and with full knowledge that streaming is not going anywhere — for Blockbuster Video to come back, even in a limited run, even as a respectful revival. Not as a hollow logo, but as a place where a new generation can learn what it felt like to wander the aisles on a Friday night. The signatures below are not nostalgia on a lark. Each one is a person who remembers, and who would show up.
— filed by the fans of Blockbuster Video, at products.rip
Read the full story and sources on the memorial page.