Not to be dramatic, but video stores were some of the greatest places on earth, and our society is worse off without them.
If you agree, perhaps to a slightly less deranged extent, you’re not the only one. Eric Knobel hears it from folks all the time: “If you were around for video stores, I think you’re definitely missing video stores at this point,” he says.
Wouldn’t it be fun if you could rent from one again? Knobel thinks so. He’s the founder and executive director of The Video Store MPLS, a nonprofit that’ll soon start fundraising to open a brick-and-mortar shop in Minneapolis.
There hasn’t been a place to rent videos in the Twin Cities since 2018, when Minneapolis’s wonderful Movies on 35th closed its doors. The last one serving the greater metro area, Robbinsdale’s Video Universe, shut down in 2023. But there are thriving nonprofit rental stores in other parts of the country—Scarecrow Video in Seattle, for example—which helped inspire Knobel to give it a go here in the Twin Cities.
Folks miss their Blockbusters and Hollywood Videos for a number of reasons. Nostalgia is one factor, and there’s also the loss of yet another third space where you could browse movies, get recommendations, and just… hang out and watch whatever the clerks had on for a little bit.
Knobel’s new endeavor, however, was perhaps less motivated by a love of video stores than it was a hatred of streaming services.
“Where I kind of got radicalized was the constant encroaching of streaming, and how it went from being this convenient thing that could have actually ruled, if they would have done it right, to just sort of endless greed and gatekeeping for profit,” he says.
He points to streamers like HBO Max deleting titles just so they don’t have to pay residuals on them, an idea he finds “appalling.” Plus, streaming subscription prices keep going up; at the same time, Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon are finding more ways to insert ads into the viewing experience. “I paused something the other day because I wanted to look at the frame and an ad came up instead,” Knobel laughs. He’s betting that lots of folks share his frustration with streaming platforms, even if they don’t have a good solution.
Plus, the average streamer only hosts a few thousand titles at a time; the aforementioned Scarecrow Video in Seattle stocks more than 150,000. Knobel believes movies and television are art forms that should be preserved, seen, and shared—that a few billionaires shouldn’t get to decide what you can watch, what’s accessible, and what gets deleted.
“The primary mission [of The Video Store MPLS] is to preserve and archive every single movie we can get our hands on, from the classic greats to the objectively terrible,” Knobel says.
The Video Store MPLS has already collected 3,000+ titles, and Knobel hopes to have around 10,000 by the time the shop opens its doors. Many of those were acquired by his “making some extreme purchases” of people’s libraries on Facebook Marketplace, but from here on out he’s hoping to fill out the collection with donations. “We've taken in about 500 donated titles in the last two weeks alone, which is super encouraging,” he says.
This August, The Video Store MPLS will host a monthlong crowdfunding campaign that kicks off with a screening at the Trylon and wraps with an event at Strike Theater. Financial donations collected during that period will help Knobel land a brick-and-mortar space, and you can keep up with the progress on Instagram at @thevideostorempls or at thevideostorempls.org.
Now, your friends at Racket are not so delusional that we think everyone loves physical media as much as we do. (...No one bring up that recent 2,500-word feature we published on CRT TVs.)
But it does seem like there’s a bit of a DVD and Blu-ray renaissance happening locally: Sloppy Discs brought video rental back to the Twin Cities on a pop-up basis in 2024, and Saturn Video and Cafe, which we’ll have more news on very shortly, is also crowdfunding to open a video store. Ant Hill Video, the rental arm of Cult Film Collective, has been around for years. And while it’s a retail store and not a rental shop, Vinegar Syndrome, the distro company that preserves and releases cult and genre films, is opening a location in Dinkytown in the coming months.
Once the doors open and the inventory expands a little more, Knobel hopes The Video Store MPLS will bring all these different groups of movie nerds together with in-store screenings, talks from local filmmakers, movie clubs, private screenings, and theme nights. He notes that there’s an entire generation out there who never really got to experience video stores—the fun of wandering through the carpeted aisles, arguing with friends about whether to rent something new or take out Leprechaun: Back 2 tha Hood for the ninth time.
“Video stores were awesome,” Knobel says. “And that sort of physical space is disappearing by the day.”
