Minneapolis’s last remaining video rental store, Movies on 35th, rented its final DVD in 2018. Robbinsdale’s Video Universe, which had been around since the mid-’80s, held out a few years longer before closing in 2023. And that was that—the Twin Cities no longer had a video store.
The shops cited the same factors for closing (the prevalence of streaming, the slowing foot traffic, the feeling that the concept had run their course), and, in all likelihood, neither closure impacted the average Twin Citian very much. But for some of us (avid movie watchers, irredeemable nostalgics, chatty motherfuckers who like to banter with shopkeepers) nothing compares to the experience of actually going to a video store, browsing the shelves, and picking out a movie to take home.
And that’s where Sloppy Discs, a new movie-rental pop-up from Minneapolis’s Emmet Kowler, comes in.
“Basically, I’m sick of streaming,” says Kowler, whose pop-up encourages people to “escape the scroll.” A few years ago, he went to visit friends in Seattle who lived just blocks from the incredible independent video store Scarecrow Video, and an idea started to form in his mind: “I have this dumb collection kind of built up already, is there any possible way I could make it portable?”
After a few years spent incubating the idea, the most recent random price bump from identity-challenged HBO Max was the last streaming straw. Two giant plastic disc totes and one slime-green logo design later (“‘Toxic Blockbuster’ was the brief in my brain,” Kowler says), Sloppy Discs launched in November, and has been popping up weekly at northeast Minneapolis spots like Broken Clock Brewing's Curioso Coffee Bar and The Main Cinema.
The rental process is simple: For a $15 deposit, browsers can borrow up to three discs at a time for $5 a piece. You have two weeks to watch and return your rentals; Kowler uses the cataloging app Libib to keep track of the inventory of roughly 250 DVDs and Blu-ray discs, which, you may have heard, are making a bit of a boutique comeback.
As for his frustrations with your Netflixes and Hulus, Kowler cites a common complaint. “The selection process, for being algorithmically tuned, is generally pretty awful,” he says. And then there's the expense: The average American now spends $69 (not nice!) per month on streamers, a figure that almost half consider too spendy.
At Sloppy Discs, you’ll find little collections of three to five movies, which Kowler has scrawled out on colorful note cards. On a recent Tuesday at The Main Cinema, those categories included “Starring Benicio Del Toro,” “Directed by the Coen brothers,” and “Bienvenido a Miami”—an idea that was a little inspired by Criterion’s current Miami Neonoir collection and a little inspired by The Bear’s recent “gofastboatsmojito” Easter egg.
“I’m working on my programming skills,” Kowler says. His physical media collection sits front and center in his living room, and as he looks at it throughout the day new patterns will emerge, whether thematic or relating to the cast and production. At each weekly pop-up, there are a few new groupings, some more cinephilic (“Production Design by Jess Gonchor”) and some with broad appeal (“The Bay Area: The Twin Cities of the West Coast?”).
But Kowler is just as happy to have folks scan the spines in the portable tote, or to make a more personalized recommendation to folks who prefer it.
“Sometimes I really try to get people to let me do a dealer’s choice, if maybe I’ve been seeing them for the last couple weeks or couple months,” he says. “That’s part of the goal, certainly—people went to video stores to get recommendations from a human.”
In some weeks, a half-dozen or so people pop by the Sloppy Discs pop-up. Other weeks, it gets no visitors, which bothers its cinephile founder less than you might think.
“I want to let this grow pretty offline,” says Kowler, who doesn’t spend a lot of time agonizing over Instagram posts or the Sloppy Discs web presence. “To me, part of the joy and part of what I'm trying to promote here is the beauty of an offline thing.” He also doesn’t have any illusions about the scale of Sloppy Discs, or its ability to compete with streamers: “Part of the reason video stores died is because something more convenient came along.”
Instead, he’s focusing his energy on perfecting the cadence, timing, and location that makes for a well-attended pop-up—and that results in actually getting discs back from people. Ultimately, he sees Sloppy Discs as a success so long as he’s meeting cool people who are into movies.
“Just don’t ask me what my Blu-ray budget is,” he laughs.
Sloppy Discs will be at The Main Cinema on Tuesdays (6-8 p.m.) for the remainder of July, and you can find upcoming pop-up dates and additional info on Instagram or at sloppydiscs.com.
