Matt Zoller Seitz writes about the pending disappearance of the Blockbuster chain.
I was only a Blockbuster customer for a brief time. The one near me (now extinct) never seemed to have the titles I wanted on hand…or if they did, they'd be well-worn, unplayable copies. There were times I'd feel silly renting one movie — making the trip there, making the trip back with one — so I'd find myself wandering aisles and browsing racks, looking desperately for something else I wanted to watch. It got to be more like a chore to go there than a pleasure.
I was mostly interested in older movies since the current releases were readily available on my satellite dish. But if Blockbuster even had some desired older film, they had one scuffed copy of its first DVD release, no copy of the more recent, deluxe DVD release. Netflix doesn't upgrade as swiftly as the sellers of DVDs either but it's not as bad. The only thing I liked about Blockbuster was the occasional comedic moment…like when I asked a teenaged employee about a certain film starring Buster Keaton and she went to the computer, looked it up and said, "We don't have that but we just got in a movie with someone named Diane Keaton." Yeah…Buster Keaton, Diane Keaton — what's the difference?