AntcuFaalb said:
SilverWook said:
zombie84 said:
You must live in the United States pf Blockbuster Video.
But seriously, the last time Blockbuster mattered was 2004. The company has been effectively dismantled since 2008 or so.
It seems so. I'm sure location and demographics have something to do with it. (The major indie video rental place in the area is also a record shop.)
I've heard some video stores are still rocking with VHS in predominately senior communities. I imagine the new release section is a tad thin?
I have an excellent (thriving!) Blockbuster near me. I live in Columbia, MD.
Man, I used to think that the BLOCKBUSTER EMPIRE would be around forever...
timdiggerm said:
AntcuFaalb said:
I have an excellent (thriving!) Blockbuster near me. I live in Columbia, MD.
True, but there used to be like 3 or 4 in the Columbia area.
Source: Former employee of one that doesn't exist anymore.
DC area represent!
Growing up just outside the western edge of the Fall Church city limits, I actually never lived within a short enough driving distance of a blockbuster. Closest one was miles away. It didn't matter, of course, since there were other places that were much closer. I remember an erol's about a mile away when I was like five, which later became a box office video and I think is now a hallmark store or something. A year or two later, I remember a West Coast Video opening up about a mile away in the opposite direction. This later became a Forbes (circa '96) and then a Potomac Video (circa 2000), which then had to move to a smaller space in an adjacent plaza (circa 2007) before Netflix and the economy finally killed it (circa 2010). Ah, good memories of that place. Fanboys was the last dvd I remember renting there (May 19th, 2009) before it eventually disappeared.
There was also a Hollywood Video a couple miles' drive into Falls Church, not sure if it's still there now, kinda doubt it.
My parents have been in the process of selling that house I grew up in, so these days I've been bouncing between my grandfather's place in Vienna (ironically, much much closer to that blockbuster, if it's even still there (I haven't checked in a while)) and my Mom's place in DC. I actually ended up getting a blockbuster card several years ago after my friend moved to Annandale and the blockbuster was the nearest video place.
When I finally went back to finish college a couple years ago, a blockbuster had become the closest place to rent movies. There had been a Video Americain in town, but when I came back it had closed its doors. Found out a lot of their collection ended up in the hands of the school library, which itself already had a good 10,000 dvd's (even a few laserdiscs and bd's) and thus made paying to watch movies kinda pointless. I remember we ventured out to bb once to try to find the original dawn of the dead, which the library didn't have for some reason, but neither did they.
I got a blu-ray player about four years ago after hearing about a sweet online promotion where you could get a (good) player and four bd's all for $200, pretty damn good deal at the time. I've actually sold off most of my dvd's, of which I had more than a hundred.
Sometimes this was to my chagrine. For example:
I sold off my Star Trek movie dvd's in anticipation of their release on blu-ray, was let down when the screenshots went up online and - with the exception of Wrath of Khan, which got a full restoration - they looked either DNR'd or contrast-boosted or a horrid combination of the two. Undiscovered Country's blu-ray is sourced from a 1080i master, probably because they wanted all the movies to be in their theatrical cuts and didn't have any other readily (non-expensive) available source than some ancient hdtv master. That boxset was like the blu-ray equivalent of what LFL pulled on dvd with the GOUT.
That having been said, it's worth noting that even though - as has been said in the last couple pages of this thread - the studios are not seeing the revenue they expected from these expensive restorations (like godfather and wizard of oz) ..... THEY'RE DOING THEM ANYWAY. Now that Disney owns Lucasfilm, there is no excuse beyond not wanting Fox to make a home video distribution profit off the OOT, which is negligible anyway.* Like I said, they should just give Fox theatrical distribution rights on EpVII in exchange for home video on the existing films.
*Assuming, as we've already speculated, that GL didn't have some clause in the deal about the original versions never seeing the light of day.
