When was blockbuster invented

B lockbuster also acquired the right to market tapes of the Olympi c games. In a further effort to encourage rentals, the company launched an adv ertising campaign themed "Win in a Flash," and made an agreement with the Showtime cable network for a joint promotion. In August , Bl ockbuster dropped its rental price for hit movies for the first three months after their release and shortened the time they were taken ou t, as a further step to raise earnings.

In an effort to ensure that t he company would be just as good at running video stores over the lon g haul as it was at opening them, Blockbuster hired more senior execu tives with long-term experience in the retail field.

In addition to these efforts to increase earnings in the United State s, Blockbuster increased its foreign efforts. With 30 stores already established in Britain, Blockbuster announced in November a large expansion in that country, designed to make it the nation's number one video re ntal chain. Further foreign involvement came later that month, when P hilips Electronics N.

As a result of this partnership, Blockbuster said that it would market Philips's newly introduced interactive compact d isc systems and software in its stores. To streamline its corporate management, Blockbuster bought a large of fice building in Florida and consolidated the company's five regional offices. The company hoped that, through joint ventures, internatio nal operations would contribute a quarter of revenues by With 9 52 stores in nine foreign countries, Blockbuster began to intensify i ts efforts to expand both in products and geographically.

In October , Blockbuster embarked on a series of agreements that were designed to expand the company's operations beyond its core movi e rental business. O ne month later, Blockbuster entered into an agreement with the Britis h conglomerate Virgin Group plc to set up "megastores" in the United States, Europe, and Australia.

In December , the first such store in the United States opened in Los Angeles, the precursor to a netwo rk of stores that Huizenga envisioned not only renting videos, but al so selling and renting music, computer programs, and games, and conta ining high-tech "virtual reality" entertainment arcades. The company also hoped to improve on the traditionally low profits of music retai ling by adding other, more profitable products.

By , the distinctive bright blue and yellow Blockbuster logo ador ned more than 3, video stores worldwide, about one-third of them o verseas. Republic's most valuable asset was its film library of television shows and films, including several John Wayne m ovies and the hit television series Bonanza.

In March , Bl ockbuster also purchased Moreover, Blockbuster began construction of a prototype family e ntertainment center in Florida. With its ever-growing number of corporate activities, Blockbuster was committed to diversification as a means of ensuring its future in th e entertainment industry in the face of the potential onslaught of ne w formats--video-on-demand and satellite TV--and the shift from renta ls to lower-priced tapes.

Viacom did win the war for Paramount, b ut the merger talks with Blockbuster stalled, and the move cost Block buster a great deal as Blockbuster shareholders lost confidence in th e company and wondered if its investment in Viacom would pay off.

By April , Blockbuster's and Viacom's stock had tumbled dramatically. Blockbuster's glory days appeared to be over.

Insiders assessed that the company was suffering from dramatic changes in the industry. Spec ifically, with competition stiffening due to newly emerging formats, the video industry's meteoric growth began to level off. Moreover, th ere was trouble internally. The merger between Blockbuster and Viacom , though eventually effected, had been rough, and Viacom was reported ly depending heavily upon Blockbuster's cash to help pay its debts an d have money for future investments.

In addition, leadership at Blockbuster seemed unstable. Wayne Huizeng a ceded his leadership role in the company in September and was replaced as president by Steven Berrard, who focused on rapidly expan ding the company during his year-and-a-half on the job. Amid legal en tanglements involving earlier business dealings, however, Berrard lef t to be succeeded by Bill Fields in March Soon thereafter, Fiel ds was named CEO as well and during his brief tenure attempted to rev italize the company's image.

Specifically, he set about transforming Blockbuster's video rental stores into whole entertainment centers, s elling t-shirts, toys, snacks, books, magazines, and CDs as well as s elling and renting videos. Fields also oversaw the company's move fro m Fort Lauderdale to Dallas to be closer to its new, centralized dist ribution center. He also downsized the company's workforce, paring ba ck about one-third of its senior staff and two-thirds of its overall staff before he left for a position at Wal-Mart.

Parent V iacom's stock price was 60 percent off its former high. By the time John Antioco took over in the summer of , Blockbuster was floundering. New releases were not making it to stores by their "street date," and the loss of so many key people with the company's move left it stumbling in basic store operations.

Now of course some independents will stay independent and be better off for it, but most people who made independent films could conceivably expect some kind of audience and a shot at the big league. In The '80s and The '90s , independent film-makers were more or less expected to make a career in the margins and remain there and at best hope to break through by carving out some niche or the other, or somehow reinventing themselves into a mainstream film-maker such as Steven Soderbergh who was a Sundance discovery who later made Ocean's Eleven and Out of Sight.

The real hope of revenue for these films was home video and international sales. Home Video provided wide accessibility but also greater marginalization and invisibility from the mainstream. Prior to home video, independent films would often get at best limited releases in "arthouse" theaters that would limit their exposure, and films with controversial subject matter or offensive content often found themselves getting consigned to the "grindhouse" circuit by virtue of the X or NC ratings.

Now they could bypass theaters entirely and go Direct to Video. Much of the DTV sales model was built by independent studios that couldn't afford theatrical runs for their films. But this meant that the audiences for these films were largely niche fans or genre-specialists and cinephiles and provided little room to reach audiences from other demographics.

Film critics note that before one could say that both the mainstream and the independent scene had great talent and visionaries, now the independent scene had the bulk of the innovation, much of it was unrewarded, little-known and had little to no cultural impact. The major positive effect of home video was that it provided a channel for young film geeks who had spent much of their lives watching old films on TV and video, picking up the various techniques used by classic directors, and deciding that they wanted to become filmmakers themselves.

Other directors, such as The Coen Brothers , worked with both independent and major studios interchangeably. In the late s and early s, the big studios started their own subsidiary labels devoted to independent films such as Fox Searchlight Pictures , Sony Pictures Classics , Universal 's Focus Features and prior to Paramount Vantage , in order to farm Hollywood's award-season arsenal , winning critical acclaim and, sometimes, commercial success. In addition, many independent studios, such as Lionsgate , Annapurna , STX and Magnolia as well as the now-defunct PolyGram , Miramax , The Weinstein Company , FilmDistrict , New Line and Summit , have gained footholds in the mainstream market by both distributing independent and foreign films and, increasingly, making films in-house Lionsgate's Saw franchise, Summit's Twilight adaptations , often raking in enough money to blur the line between "indie" and "major".

At the same time, the "Indie wave" not only rehabilitated the names of the New Hollywood-era auteurs which had spent the s dealing with financial failures and critical indifference, but in many cases drove them to a degree of mainstream recognition they never expected.

While s film-making was marked by a resurgence of New Hollywood tropes amid a slump of high-budget films and franchises, Corman alumnus James Cameron stumped Hollywood in with Titanic , an update of the old-fashioned Epic Movie blended with Disaster Movie elements, featuring the then little-known actors Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio. Not only Cameron's vision had paid off but it would set the pattern for an ever-increasing focus not only on how a film should be made, but more importantly how it should be sold.

Movies now had to appeal to the widest audience possible to be successful, putting special attention to the Fleeting Demographic Rule. While movies have always depended on other media for material, adaptations of popular works would not become a dominating force in the industry until , the year Warner Bros.

The success of both The Sorcerer's Stone and The Fellowship of the Ring changed the industry entirely, even establishing the modern storytelling structure found in Hollywood films. Their successes immediately sent waves to the other studios, now urged to look for a "fantasy" material, as it is attractive to audiences of all ages, b a propriety with long-term potential, and most importantly c get your hands on anything popular extending the previous point — a video game, a s TV show preferably a cartoon , a comic strip, toys or even internet symbols — to take advantage of existing fandoms and merchandising.

But one source, carrying all these attributes, would prove by far, the most popular to be translated to the screen: superhero comic books, something that actually came off as a surprise at the beginning, considering that it had been confined to low-budget fare for decades, except for WB's attempts to cash on its newly-acquired DC Comics properties in The '80s Superman and The '90s Batman , with both attempts eventually crashing.

Then, 's X-Men released by 20th Century Fox became a surprise hit following on the footsteps of 's Blade by New Line Cinema and Sam Raimi 's film Spider-Man released by Columbia Pictures turned out to be an unprecedented success that set the trend for more superhero films: Universal attempted to turn Hulk into a franchise to no avail, while Fox had mediocre results with Fantastic Four and Warners decided to give their DC characters another chance, but they would only have success with Christopher Nolan 's Dark Knight trilogy.

With time, Marvel decided to get a larger piece of the cake and started their own film studio, 's Iron Man kick-started the Marvel Cinematic Universe and revived Robert Downey Jr. By the time The Avengers was released in , the MCU became a major player in Hollywood, also helped by Disney's acquisition of the publisher in By the mids, Warner Bros. The main reason for this flood of adaptations, sequels, remakes, reboots and the like was a series of improvements on the home entertainment field during the second half of the s and the early part of the s: Cable TV became ubiquitous, with channels upping their ante on terms of original content, especially in the case of "premium" networks such as HBO and AMC , both of which launched series with unheard-of production values such as The Sopranos and Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Meanwhile, the booming Internet, game consoles and the fact that TV networks were skewing towards younger audiences kept the coveted demographic away from the movie house.

To complicate matters, the arrival of DVDs meant that people could enjoy a movie at home not only with reliable, high-quality image and sound compared to VHS, but also allowed access to added features and other freebies. Their popularity and later decline led to the "theatrical window" to shrink from six months or more to 90 days, which added to the urge for higher first-weekend grosses at the box-office. Later on, movie circuits began adding "premium" services with reclining bergere-type seats and dine-in options.

These changes eventually translated in a general increase on the prices of tickets from the mids onwards, and grosses have increased in a sustained basis even if attendance hasn't reached the heights of the late s and early s peaking with 's 1,,, admissions, with no year surpassing 1. The season had another turning point: 3D films took off again and raunchy comedies reached a peak at the same time dependence on adaptations and franchises increased.

The releases of James Cameron's Avatar which surpassed Titanic 's record, holding the title of the highest-grossing movie for nine years and Tim Burton 's Alice in Wonderland led to a nother three-dimensional craze, although it did not take long for the arrival of a glut of poorly-made films with 3-D added in post-production mostly to make them marketable.

All this alienated audiences, which saw in 3-D an excuse to rise prices further instead of actually using it to improve storytelling or experience, the fact some theaters had no "flat" prints becoming an annoyance to many who did not have the money or the inclination to see a 3-D movie.

By the end of the season, 3-D pretty much became the province of animated films and superhero movies, being gradually and quietly sidelined by the middle of the decade, although without completely disappearing in contrast to previous 3-D waves.

Adult comedies, which had become increasingly successful during the late s and early s with films like There's Something About Mary , American Pie. Dude, Where's My Car? By this time, even comedies promoted to family audiences would offer material that would have been considered distasteful years earlier.

Social attitudes towards humor in general also shifted early in the decade, especially regarding the constant use of certain actions and language that had come to be considered offensive. With the exception of the superhero comedy Deadpool , the animated film Sausage Party also , the two theatrical adaptations of It and the loosely-based-on-comics dramas Logan and Joker , female-geared films pretty much became the only commercially-viable type of R-rated films during the s, beginning with the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy Similarly, comedy films became mostly geared to women after the success of Bad Moms After over a decade of mounting criticism from parents' associations and watchdog groups, the MPAA enacted more stringent measures that radically changed its ratings system: "PG" became both the most common rating for films and the highest-grossing one, replacing "PG" which soon gained the "G" rating's reputation of being a sign of "kiddie stuff", being now associated with animated films.

By the second half of the s, the number of G- and PG-rated films released per year combined was not more than twenty. On the other hand, the number of R-rated films also decreased many of the films receiving this rating primarily, if not only, for language while the NC rating, never able to shake off its being a successor to the "X" rating, pretty much fell into disuse, with films that would have received the rating choosing to go unrated.

All this has generated a Broken Base among film fans. One side has considered that Hollywood has underwent a "kid-ification", spearheaded by fantasy-laden High Concept productions, while the other considers that the opposite has occurred, with the prevalence of Family-Unfriendly Violence in action films and raunchy humor in family movies.

Other independent video stores could only keep track of or so movies. Blockbuster had an innovative new barcode system, which meant that they could track up to 10, VHSs per store to each registered customer, which also meant that they could keep an eye on those lucrative late fees. Under Huizenga, Blockbuster embarked on an aggressive expansion plan, buying out existing video-rental chains while opening new stores at a rate of one per day.

By , just three years after the first store opened, Blockbuster was America's No. But as Blockbuster became a multibillion-dollar company in the early '90s, adding music and video-game rental to its stores, Huizenga was worried about how emerging technology like cable television could hurt Blockbuster's video-store model.

In only two years under Viacom, Blockbuster lost half of its value. While Blockbuster and its new boss, John Antioco, focused on brick-and-mortar video stores, technological innovations meant that competition was on the rise. In a deal that saw Enron do most of the work, a robust video-on-demand platform was successfully built and tested with customers.

But it soon became clear to Enron that Blockbuster was so focused on its lucrative video stores that it had little time or commitment for the video-on-demand business. As a result, in , Blockbuster walked away from the first major development of wide-scale movie streaming. Within a few years, Netflix and other competitors began to eat into Blockbuster's profits, not by undercutting it, but by reimagining video rental in the digital age. Commercial: There's a better way to rent movies. Go to Netflix.

This frustrated many customers, including Netflix founder Reed Hastings. In its early stages, Hastings' company, which had no late fees, would send DVDs straight to your house for a flat monthly rate. Netflix went on to become even more popular and more profitable than Blockbuster. Redbox's addition to the market reinforced the idea that people wanted quicker rental options with no late fees, so Blockbuster had to make a change. In , Viacom parted ways with Blockbuster. That same year, the company launched Blockbuster Online, but it was already years behind Netflix.

At the same time, Blockbuster decided to end late fees. At the time, there were only Blockbuster stores still in operation, Business Insider reported. The standalone Blockbuster says it's still in operation because of its loyal customer base, citing the fact that they have 4, accounts and sign up new customers each day. The store also said a large number of tourists visits the store to reminisce about the former rental company.

In , the lone store plans to open its doors for overnight guests by partnering with Airbnb. For you. World globe An icon of the world globe, indicating different international options. Get the Insider App.