Kierre' Review of The Last Blockbuster 2020 ★★★

Watched Mar 28, 2021

The Last Blockbuster is a Documentary film streaming on Netflix and is mostly about literally the last Blockbuster store left which is located in Oregon. The film also discusses the rise and fall of the retail rental chain and how exactly individuals went from going into stores like Blockbuster to being at home and streaming films. First off, not matter what the people in the Documentary tell you, Netflix is mostly to blame for the fall of video rental stores. The film will try to fool you into thinking that the real reason that Blockbuster fails is due to mismanagement and carrying too much debt. While this may have been partially true, the reason that Blockbuster had so much borrowed debt is because they needed to take out loans to fire up their own online rental service to try to compete with Netflix at the time. It is very odd to watch a Documentary about the demise of a retail chain, on a streaming service that is mostly responsible for the chain's demise... While I did enjoy the film especially once they focused on The Last Standing Blockbuster store, I didn't feel too much sympathy for the chain as they were pretty much responsible for putting smaller Mom and Pop video stores out of business back in the late 80's and 90's and it was kind of only fitting that a newer way to watch films eventually put them out of business.