Before movie night started with a search bar, choosing what to watch was somewhere you went.
Streaming solved almost every inconvenience of renting a movie.
The driving. The limited inventory. The late fees. The possibility that somebody got to The Departed before you did.
It did not solve choosing the movie.
In 2023, Nielsen found that viewers spent an average of 10 and a half minutes searching for something to watch during a streaming session. Twenty percent said they sometimes couldn’t find anything and gave up to do something else instead.
Which is remarkable when you consider that we used to get in a car to accomplish this.
And somehow, going to the video store could feel like less of a chore.
Movie night started before the movie
You walked into Blockbuster and split up. This was important. You did not slowly move through the store as a group, politely considering each title together. Everybody scattered.
Someone went straight to New Releases. Someone disappeared into Comedy. Someone went to Horror despite having been specifically told that nobody wanted a horror movie.
Ten minutes later, you reconvened carrying candidates.
“What about this?”
“Seen it.”
“This?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I don’t want to watch it.”
Then everybody separated again.
The movie hadn’t started yet. Movie night had.
New Releases could simply tell you no
New Releases was usually the first stop because obviously you wanted the new movie.
Except sometimes the movie had been out for three days and the shelf contained twelve empty copies of its box.
This was how a video store told you no.
There was no notification that it would be available Tuesday. There was no button to add it to your list. There was no row of algorithmically selected alternatives based on your viewing history.
There were twelve empty boxes. Go find another movie.
So you did.
You wandered into the regular aisles. You picked up boxes because the cover looked interesting. You flipped them over and read the descriptions. You recognized somebody.
“Hey, isn’t that the guy from Con Air?”
That was enough to get a movie into contention.
The physical box mattered. You could carry it around. Hand it to somebody. Put it back. Retrieve it 15 minutes later after all your other ideas had been rejected.
Eventually, you’d narrow six movies down to three, three down to two, and two down to whichever one nobody objected to strongly enough.
Democracy.
Harrison Ford was a genre
Blockbuster was only one version of this.
Hollywood Video had its own personality. Some stores organized displays around actors and directors, which meant you could turn a corner and discover that Harrison Ford had become a genre.
There he was.
Air Force One. The Fugitive. Patriot Games. Clear and Present Danger.
Arnold could get the same treatment. Stallone. Van Damme.
This was a perfectly reasonable way to organize a video store.
And then there were the independent places. Those could get weird.
The neighborhood video store might have decades of movies crammed onto shelves because nobody in corporate had decided it was time to make room for something else.
That’s where you could stumble across The ‘Burbs.
Not because Tom Hanks was promoting it. Not because it was trending. Not because an algorithm had determined that people who enjoyed Big might also enjoy suburban satanists.
It was just still there.
Some movie everyone involved may have stopped thinking about years ago, sitting on the fourth shelf until the exact Friday night you happened to pick up the box.
And the guy behind the counter had been watching you rent movies for years.
Eventually, he had opinions.
“You still haven’t seen Army of Darkness?”
No.
“Just rent it.”
So you did.
There was no percentage match. No “Because you watched.” No autoplaying trailer.
Just some guy who had apparently become concerned about a hole in your education.
Somehow there was always pizza
The relationship between video stores and pizza places deserves further investigation.
They always seemed to find each other.
The pizza place was next door. Or two doors down. Or, in some particularly efficient arrangements, physically attached to the video store.
It was perfect infrastructure.
Order the pizza. Go pick the movie. Browse while it cooks. Argue about the movie. Change your mind about the movie. Get the pizza. Go home.
The entire system seemed designed around the fact that pizza takes roughly the same amount of time to make as it takes two people to agree on a movie.
And sometimes you could achieve peak efficiency: a $5 Little Caesars Hot-N-Ready and a Blockbuster in the same strip mall.
Dinner and entertainment for less than the late fee you were currently pretending wasn’t on your account.
And Blockbuster itself understood what kind of evening you were having.
By the register were giant boxes of candy, microwave popcorn, soda and whatever combination of sugar could remain shelf-stable until Shrek 2 came out on DVD.
Once you’d committed to movie night, your nutritional standards were no longer Blockbuster’s concern.
The shelves made the choices smaller
A video store had an obvious disadvantage: it could only contain so many movies.
Streaming can put a nearly bottomless catalog behind your television. That’s better. So is being able to watch a movie immediately instead of discovering that every copy has already been rented.
But the physical limits of the store did something interesting to the decision.
You could see the boundaries. Here is New Releases. Here is Comedy. Here is Action. Here is Harrison Ford for some reason. Here is the wall.
You might have thousands of choices in the building, but you weren’t considering all of them at once. You were standing in one aisle, looking at 50 boxes and holding The ‘Burbs.
And sometimes you found things precisely because nobody had decided you were likely to enjoy them.
You were just wandering.
We kept the indecision
Streaming removed almost every obstacle between you and the movie.
There is no drive. No inventory. No late fee because you threw How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days in the trunk and forgot about it for three weeks.
You have thousands of movies available instantly.
And then:
“What do you want to watch?”
“I don’t care.”
“Okay, what about this?”
“Not that.”
“What about this?”
“What’s it about?”
“I don’t know.”
“Keep looking.”
Apparently the technology was not the bottleneck.
Streaming isn’t worse. The convenience is why it won.
Nobody misses driving back to Blockbuster because a DVD is due. Nobody fondly remembers finding an empty shelf where the movie they wanted was supposed to be.
But convenience doesn’t only remove annoyances. Sometimes it removes the things that accumulated around them: the wandering, the separate searches, the weird discoveries, the guy behind the counter, the argument, the pizza next door.
Choosing the movie used to have a setting.
By the time you finally agreed on something, the pizza might already be getting cold in the passenger seat. Somebody was holding the plastic case. Somebody else was still insisting their movie would have been better.
The movie hadn’t even started. But movie night already had.
Sources
Nielsen, Media Metadata: The Essential Piece to Success in Streaming, September 2023. Nielsen Streaming Content Consumer Survey, June 2023.