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'And I'm like, 'We should call it a Free Blockbuster.'' My friend's got a bunch of DVDs that she's just going to give to Goodwill,' Morrison said. 'We've got all this industrial blight that's just collecting trash on the side of the road. Morrison created a 'Free Blockbuster' out of the abandoned L.A. If you're unfamiliar, Little Free Libraries are those tiny houses on stands that facilitate book lending among neighbors. In 2018, Morrison had an idea that combined the Blockbuster brand, some old DVDs of a friend who was moving and newspaper boxes left vacant after a Los Angeles alternative weekly shut down, and spliced all of those elements together with one of the flat-out nicest ideas of all time: the Little Free Library.

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'For a lot of us who were out there in the suburban United States who were into movies, you could work at the movie theater or you could work at a video store,' Morrison said when we talked in September. Brian Morrison, like me, worked at a Blockbuster as a young adult and - as I wanted to but didn't - moved to the Los Angeles area to pursue a career in the entertainment industry. I'm also not the only former Blockbuster employee who can't quite let the brand go. We were the tiny, millipedal legs of the brand. Tens of thousands of us donned khakis and polos with that signature ticket logo stitched on. All of it happened surrounded by that blue and gold color scheme.īy no means am I alone. It's also tied up with my youth from the time I worked there - weird friends, adventures that began or ended with meet-ups at the store, doomed crushes on customers and coworkers. The brand, for me, is tied up with work: busy nights, irate customers and weird capers (exploding fire extinguishers, hunting down unreturned movies, customers who accidentally dropped off their personal adult films inside our rental cases). In the early 2000s, I worked at the busiest store in one of Blockbuster's largest franchises. I had my own small role in the brand's life, for better or worse (for both Blockbuster and me). In addition, we are actively exploring additional licensing opportunities.'īut what all could be done with the Blockbuster brand, and is there any actual value left in it? That's what I want to know.

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In an emailed statement, the company said only: 'Today, we license the Blockbuster brand to various apparel and games manufacturers, as well as to the store in Bend, OR. So what is Dish doing with the Blockbuster brand today? As a corporation, not much that I can see.ĭish declined to answer most of the questions I had about the Blockbuster brand and the company's strategy around it.

In that environment, it seems like there is some way for Blockbuster's life as a brand, if not a store, to continue on. The Juicy Couture brand, a one-time favorite among celebrities of the 2000s, is seemingly unkillable. Radioshack is an online store today after multiple attempts to save some sort of footprint. The name of FAO Schwarz, the once-iconic toy store, has in recent years appeared on products everywhere from Marshalls to Barnes & Noble, and is back in physical store form. What to do with the brand of a dead retailer? Imagination and consumer interest are the only limits, really. Bargain hunting for IP in retail bankruptcies are companies like Authentic Brands, Iconix Brands and Retail Ecommerce Ventures. Intellectual property divorced from the original operation it symbolized - and often divorced from any operations at all - is bought and sold. People seem to appreciate the brand, as a brand, more now than when it was tied to an actual chain of video stores.Īll of this is happening at a time when marketers and financiers have turned brand properties themselves into commodities. In the past year, a new book and documentary about the company have been released. Visitors have flocked from all over the world to the last store. With a precarious foothold on existence, Blockbuster has taken on a new life. And that's where things get really odd for the brand. 'Worst case we break even or make a little bit of money.'Īs the decade played out, all Blockbuster franchise stores would close too, until, today, there is only one left in Bend, Oregon. 'There was very little risk in buying,' Dish co-founder and chairman Charlie Ergen told Bloomberg of the Blockbuster acquisition in 2012, when Dish had begun to abandon its initial strategy for the video retailer. The company's initial plans for Blockbuster obviously failed while it continued poking at the brand, trying ways to tie it to on-demand video services. Around two years later, Dish would close all of Blockbuster's corporate stores.

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Blockbuster still at that time had 1,700 stores, which the satellite TV company planned to use to sell its products.

Holding limbo bar above head