Videoheaven (2025)

SPEAKER_1 (1:00)

He has infinite choices in life and here at the video store of movies to rent, but he cannot make a decision.

The video store is a place of hope and anxiety about the future. It is a place where people pass from one condition into another, where their minds wander at the same pace as their bodies, browsing. By the time Hamlet was released in May of 2000, there were over 20,000 video stores in the United States, 5,000 of which were blockbusters.

The year 2000 is a midpoint in the lifespan of the video store, roughly halfway between its beginnings in the late 1970s and its near extinction by the late 2010s. This 40-year cycle saw a rise and fall where video stores became as synonymous with films as movie theaters had been for the previous seven decades. Every image from inside a store is from or about the past. As a physical space, the video store exists only in the past. The only way to visit these stores now is through their depictions on screen, commonplace in American films and TV shows from the mid 1980s to the early 2010s. There's no obvious reason why video stores are less frequently seen in foreign films, perhaps because video stores tend to traffic in the idea of capital M movies. And the idea of capital M movies typically means Hollywood.

SPEAKER_2 (2:29)

An enterprise is of great pitch and moment in this regard.

SPEAKER_1 (2:38)

The to be or not to be speech also ponders the possibility of the afterlife. This is the condition of the video rental store today. It has been nearly erased from the landscape. Looking at this scene now, from the future, we feel how it is haunted by the eventual death of the video store.

Video stores made distribution of media a face-to-face, hand-to-hand process, physically tangible, concretely special, and intimately social. Moreover, these interactions distributed ideas and values about movies. The taste values of individual clerks become a mesh with the socially oriented tastes of browsers and customers, which would vary wildly from store to store, depending on whether it was corporate or independently owned, not to mention the personal taste and spending power of the owners.

SPEAKER_2 (3:35)

You always bring back like this. I mean, I can usually figure people out. I try to build up a character profile watching what customers take out. The thing about you is, there's no consistency.

I mean, look at these titles.

SPEAKER_4 (3:53)

You got horror, drama, comedy, even a bit of porn.

SPEAKER_2 (3:58)

And you've taken most of these out at least 20 times.

SPEAKER_5 (4:02)

I'm in deep trouble, folks. They've started the video revolution without me.

SPEAKER_6 (4:05)

Now I gotta play catch up.

SPEAKER_5 (4:06)

Here I am, 750 hard earned bucks, clutch firmly in my tight little paw. I'm at a neighborhood video store, it's typical of the ones that are cropping up all over the country.

And in 3 minutes, you and I are gonna get an education.

SPEAKER_1 (4:18)

The first video rental stores appeared in 1977, shortly after Hollywood films were first licensed for release on magnetic tape.

Whereas there were only 1.9 million American households with a VCR in 1980, 10 years later, there were 64.5 million. A shift from about 2% of the population to over 70

SPEAKER_5 (4:40)

They've become one of the hottest items of the 80s, and the forecasters say that by the end of the year, one out of every four homes in the US will have a VCR. Is it a fad or for real?

SPEAKER_7 (4:52)

It's for real.

SPEAKER_1 (4:53)

In 1985, video stores had an average of 2,395 videos.

SPEAKER_7 (4:58)

You're gonna have to have a minimum of 1,000 titles.

SPEAKER_1 (5:02)

This number increased to 3,600 in 1989, by which point revenue from home video releases had overtaken the theatrical box office.

SPEAKER_5 (5:11)

All this competition may be great for the VCR industry, but it is starting to scare some others.

Specifically, the paid television industry, like HBO and Cinemax, are starting to feel the effects. And so are the movie theaters. Some have been forced out of business as a result of all the VCR viewership.

SPEAKER_1 (5:27)

All of this represents nothing less than a profound change in the landscape of American movie culture over the course of the 1980s. Because the video industry is booming, the future of the movie theater is not known. But there are some who are not giving it a very high rating.

By the 1990s, with video rental becoming a standard practice, corporate retail chains like Blockbuster, Hollywood Video, and Movie Gallery standardized the space and experience of the video store. In contrast with the unregulated and idiosyncratic aesthetic associated with independent video stores, chain stores were large, brightly lit, had wide aisles and put video tapes, not just the cover boxes on the shelves throughout the store. They did not offer adult videos nor did they rent VCRs, providing instead a large, uncluttered, family-friendly space for the easy perusal of movies.