Is there any way Blockbuster could return to capitalize on the physical media niche at all?
>>220094946nah
>>220094946Niche clientele and since there's a limited amount of niche goods they're going to charge extravagantly or over.One example I can think of is how 'retro' game stores charge an arm and a leg for everything because they know it's muh nostalgia and niche.
>world is almost perfect>9/11 happens>Blockbuster goes out of business>COVID happensIt's really over, isn't it?
>>220094946The problem is a lot of studios aren't releasing physical media anymore. Or physical media releases have been reduced to only specific movies and TV shows So any Blockbuster would have a hard time finding supplies.
>>220094946Do the finding for you. 100 movies you might want to watch per month rental. Buy your own hard drive.Film rips in AV1/Gaussian splats. Sell cheap players to plug the hard drives into.Movies organised. Shown by player and store by poster and covers.Deliveries.Very high quality. Eg terabytes. Full transfer speed of hard drives. Or holographic disc.Mostly they need to do some selection and filtering for you. So you aren't encountering jewish shit.
>>220094946Nah, unless that shit goes mainstream or someone buys up the brand.
>>220095089It´s not hard to download a movie and create a DVD menu for it though. It´s not legal either so you can forget about Blockbuster as a brand but if one wanted to bring back rental videos that´d be entirely possible.
if Blockbuster was "resurrected" it would be in the same sense that Toys-R-Us was: as a crummy mall storespecifically, Blockbuster would come back looking like what FYE stores look like nowadaysa shelf of new DVD/Blurays, a used bin, and the rest of the store selling toys, graphic-Ts, and candy
>>220094946There is no niche outside of certain parts of the internet.Normalfags still say you're a gross incel if you prefer physical media and/or use Plex. Blockbuster could capitalize on the lame 90s nostalgia though. The fact that there isn't a "Blockbuster" streaming service is odd.
>>220095259>weird incel if you use PlexWhat kind of alternate reality do you live in where people even care which app splash screen your smart TV or set top box briefly shows before a movie plays? If anything you're weird for watching movies at all now. Normalfags have moved on to short form video content and extended advertisements on YouTube
>>220094946No, why would it. You can rent movies online or on streaming services. You can buy blu rays and dvds online if you want physical media. Why on earth would someone drive out to blockbuster to rent and drive back out to return it in 2026?
>>220095386I'm talking about them selling physical media. Because some people (like myself) do enjoy getting things in person rather than ordering online.
>>220095386If blockbuster still exist I would go there. Physically look around and choosing something to watch is better than opening netflix
>>220095504What difference does it make if you get physical media in person or online? Also, if you want to get physical media in person you can already do that. Tons of stores sell blu-rays/DVDs, albeit with a limited collection, but there are some stores usually in malls either a wide selection. Sure blockbuster could theoretically have an even wider selection than any of those stores, but in reality it could never work because most people would prefer not to buy physical media, and among those who do most would prefer to buy it online. So blockbuster simply would not be able to afford stocking a significantly wider selection of physical media than what other stores currently sell. They’d have to come back as a store like >>220095224described to stay afloat, and it wouldn’t be what you wanted. So if you’re going to say you prefer to buy physical media in person, and your reason for why you can’t do that now and want blockbuster back is because the media you can find in stores near you don’t carry what you want, chances are blockbuster would not carry what you want either. Your interests are just too niche in 2026, you’ll just have to buy it online.
>>220095549Why is physically looking at what’s stocked on the shelf better than looking through on online catalogue or list? It’s not for 99% of people which is why they stopped going to blockbuster in the first place.Furthermore, nobody ever just went to blockbuster and aimlessly walked the shelves looking for something to watch. That’s just what you did as a kid, but adults know what they want to watch, they go in, find it, and leave. The only time they’d walk around to try and find something is when whatever they actually wanted to rent was out of stock.
>>220095549Netflix can just create a VR option for this so you can pretend to browse their catalog as if it's a store
>>220095549>Doesn't have Netflix's hologram premium deal Never gonna make it
>>220094946They could return, but it wouldn't be a rental thing, because no one's gonna pay for that in a world where prime exists, normies don't care about visual fidelity, and autists who do just get rips.I do think it could come back though, but I think it ends up looking like a combo small downmarket "not a porno theater" porno theater, with rentals for birthdays and small corporate events, a souvenir shop, and accessible as general public event/cafe/subscription movie hangout space. Think Barnes and Nobles but for cinema.It's pretty much exclusively a brand play, because you already have local independent cinema in most major metropoles that fulfill most of these functions, and almost to a man they bleed money like stuck pigs, but millennials are dumb and desperate for 'third spaces' so who knows.
>>220095767Even if you knew what you wanted to get they would usually have deals. Then you'd have to find something else.
>>220094946There’s one in Eugene
Why do you retards keep asking for something to return that you wouldn't even use? How many 35+ year old men can't just move on with their god damn lives already?
>>220095767They'd often have two for one deals, people would rent 4 tapes at a time. They made money on late fees which compounded when you had a big stack. People tried out new things based on box art and the blurb on the back of the box.
>>220095386Streaming platforms exhaust you with mountains of trash and retarded foreign films. If you want actual kino you typically have to pay to rent and you have to search for it yourself since it won’t show up if you just browse various genres.A blockbuster style blu ray rental would basically keep a large supply of classics from the 80’s-2012 or so when film fell off a cliff and would let you get in and get out without scrolling endlessly trying to find something that isn’t totally shit or requires you to pay extra and watch within a day or whatever stupid shit they do on streaming
>>220095052>>Blockbuster goes out of business>>COVID happens>It's really over, isn't it?nigga theres like a 17 year gap there
>>220095973It took them 17 years to fill the world full of vaguely Hispanic people and little white kids with perms, all saying "nigga," before the destruction was guaranteed
>>220094946I'm still waiting for some actual figures on this alleged "physical media" comeback. Are the handful of companies producing BD players experiencing increased demand? If so, that does not seem to be trickling down to new release sales figures. Disney literally fired all of their home video people this month. Sony barely releases anime anymore and that used to be a strong category for physical media post-streaming.
>>220095946Blockbuster would just make a selection for you based on what they stock, there are a million lists you find online that you can discover movies from. If you’re relying on an algorithm to recommend you something, you’re retarded. And I trust lists made by people online to recommend better movies to me than whatever blockbuster thinks.
>>220094946gay faggot thread
Memorabilia storeWon't be exactly a store in every city but enough
>>220094946people only like physical media in theory. when they have to actually go through the process of hooking up and setting up a VHS player, rewind tapes, physically go to the rental store to pick up/return a video, deal with the disappointment of the movie they wanted being checked out, and on and on, their interest in the medium evaporates immediately. there's a reason why physical died in the first place: it's tedious to deal with on a regular basis.
>>220094946if you rent one movie and one game from Blockbuster (20-30 years ago) it was around 15 bucks but you know that's like 90's money so with inflation they would be charging you probably like 12 bucks per movie if they were still trying to do it. And nobody is gonna pay that much to rent one movie when they can get a month of Hulu for the same price.They would have to switch to a monthly subscription pricing model that is around the same price and just let people do unlimited rentals off of the monthly price. And that kind of money isn't going to keep a physical location of a Blockbuster video store open because even the big streamer services are bleeding money at their prices.It can't happen. too much enshittification
>>220094946I can download it from my chair for free, why would I want to drive to the store to pay for it?
>>220095973There was a black man in the white house during that time. I don't like to think about it.
>>220094946Have you ever gone to a supermarket or fast food joint and been shocked at how understaffed it was? I'm talking two or three employees for the whole store. That's how low the margins are for brick and mortar. If Walmart and McDonalds are being squeezed this hard, how could Blockbuster turn a profit?
>>220095863Oregon? I thought the last one was in Bend
>>220094946if Musk really thinks he's based, this is what he would do: any DVD in passable condition trades in for $2, Blu-Rays $3, 4K UHD $4. then have a gigantic bargain bin/shelf section.
>>220097467too bad, he was a far better president than the fucking pedo currently in the White House
>>220095052Never even began.
my library has a decent selection. it's comfy to browse.
>>220097322I think worst part of physical media is owning a large library of it. VHS tapes take up a ton of fucking room and look stupid on a shelf. Doesn’t matter how dogshit a movie was you never want to throw it away, so you end up holding onto that copy of Highlander 2 for multiple decades.
they would have a great first month and then dieso they should do an annual spirit halloween thing
>>220097212Oh great so instead of scrolling through millions of trash flicks I can scroll through millions of trash lists of flicks.What I’m getting at here is the avoidance of the “paralysis of choice”. If you walk into the grocery store and there are 3 or 5 types of pasta sauce to pick from then you just pick the one you like the label of knowing you can just try them all and decide eventually which is best. But if there are 7 aisles full of 10,000 pasta sauces suddenly you have this massive draining task of trying to figure out even where to start. It’s too much. The streaming platforms all suffer from these bloated catalogues mostly filled with schlock and slop. I just wanna walk in, grab one or two flicks and watch them and not worry about the 7,000 other films made that week that I’m not gonna watch
>>220097467Orange is the new black
>>220095917Nice soulless third worlder opinion
The name would have to change. Today, there's no such thing as a blockbuster movie, with people lining up around the block. Do they even have theaters anymore?
>>220094946>capitalize on the physical media nicheNah, it's an aging micro niche. The future is a prison and you will live in a screen
