In Matt Jardin’s front yard in Anchorage’s Airport Heights neighborhood is something you don’t see everyday: a giant blue box with the unmistakable yellow Blockbuster logo on the side. It’s about 4 feet tall, with two plastic doors covering shelves filled with DVDs. Jardin put it up a few weeks ago.
“So basically a Little Free Library, but for DVDs, Blu-rays, some people have put VHSs in there,” Jardin said. “I don’t know if people have VCRs to play them, but there are VHSs in there.”
Jardin’s Free Blockbuster is the first registered in Alaska, but there are dozens that have popped up in neighborhoods across the Lower 48. The Free Blockbuster movement leans into the nostalgia many feel for the once-massive video chain that filed for bankruptcy 14 years ago.
At a Free Blockbuster, anyone can take a movie or leave a movie. You don’t have to return it and, unlike a real Blockbuster, there are certainly no late fees. Jardin is a filmmaker, and a self-professed cinephile, so when he saw the idea for the Free Blockbuster on Reddit, he was inspired to make his own.
“It kind of harkens back, to me, to an old way of discovering movies – you would just kind of walk through the store and just try to discover something that you might not have heard of,” Jardin said. “Of course, with a Free Blockbuster, you’re not really able to walk down any hallways, but, you know, if we could carve out just a tiny slice of that nostalgia, then great.”
Jardin created his Free Blockbuster using an abandoned newspaper box that a friend found in town.
“It’s been a really cool response in such a short amount of time,” Jardin said. “I’ve noticed neighbors coming by and just dropping off stuff.”
The Free Blockbuster movement was started in 2019 in Los Angeles by a former Blockbuster employee. The libraries are all volunteer-made – the website, freeblockbuster.org, provides stencils for the logo but other than that, there’s no centralized system for the boxes.
There are Free Blockbusters in more than 40 U.S. states, and there are dozens of local news stories telling of communities that find them whimsical and fun.
But there is one entity that doesn’t seem to like them: Blockbuster itself.
The Free Blockbuster organization received a cease-and-desist letter from DISH Network, which owns the Blockbuster brand, for using the Blockbuster logo. In response, Free Blockbuster has submitted a licensing request, but it’s still pending.
Despite Jardin’s Free Blockbuster being the first in Alaska, some neighbors like Lisa Switzer said that the lending library makes more sense in the state than it would in other places. Alaska was the second-to-last state to hold on to real a Blockbuster video rental store – the last two closed in 2018.
“There’s a lot of people that have places where they don’t have internet access, like cabins and things like that, where they still use that kind of stuff,” Switzer said. “So I think it’s something that’s not phased out here as much as it is in the Lower 48 because people still kind of have a need for it.”
Jardin agrees that Alaskans have a tendency to do things old school, pointing out that Rainbow Video only closed in the past year.
But, even as he spearheads the Free Blockbuster movement in Alaska, Jardin admitted that, like most other people, he likes the convenience of streaming. Still, he said, it doesn’t replace the value of actually owning a movie you really love. Jardin also liked the mission that was written on the Free Blockbuster website.
“The purpose of it was to kind of combat this myth of scarcity when it comes to entertainment and combat the idea that when something is pulled off of streaming, it’s gone forever,” Jardin said.
Jardin’s Free Blockbuster is on the corner of Columbine Street and 19th Avenue. Flipping through the plastic DVD cases, you might find “Annie the Musical,” several seasons of the TV series “Community,” ”Game of Thrones,” a documentary about drag kings and even some Alaska-specific movies, including “The Adventures of Monty the Moose.”
Jardin said he likes to go through the stacks every once in a while to see what’s new, and more importantly, what’s missing.
“I feel like people are nervous about taking things, and really that’s the whole point of something like this,” he said. “Don’t feel like you have to reciprocate and put something in. Feel free to just take a movie if you want to rediscover something, or discover something entirely new.”
