There is only one remaining Blockbuster location — in Bend, Oregon.
At its peak in 2004, Blockbuster, the wildly successful movie rental chain, boasted 9,094 locations. Today it has just one. Bend, Oregon, is home to the former giant’s last remaining outpost, a status the store attained when its counterpart in a suburb of Perth, Australia, closed in 2019. Originally opened in 1992 as Pacific Video, the location became a Blockbuster franchise store eight years later — and doesn’t look to be closing any time soon. That’s thanks in part to the 2020 documentary The Last Blockbuster, which contributed to the brick-and-mortar store being cemented as a tourist attraction among nostalgia-minded visitors.
Besides the throwback vibe, another major attraction is the store’s expansive library. The Bend Blockbuster has a collection of around 25,000 movies, more than six times as many as Netflix, the monolith most responsible for its parent company’s slow decline. And while no one doubts the convenience of streaming, cinephiles continue to champion independent shops such as Scarecrow Video in Seattle (120,000 titles available) and Cinefile Video in Los Angeles (30,000) that carry rare and/or out-of-print selections unlikely to be found on Netflix, Hulu, or most other streaming services.
Back when the company was in its infancy, Netflix’s founders offered to sell their DVD-by-mail business to Blockbuster for the princely sum of $50 million. Blockbuster declined, and at the time their reasoning was sound — it was early 2000, their own company was valued at $6 billion, and Netflix was on track to lose $57 million that year alone. Within a decade, their fortunes had completely reversed: Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy in 2010, by which time Netflix had shifted away from its mail-order roots to focus on streaming video. In 2020, the company made close to $25 billion in revenue.
