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It’s been 14 years since the video rental company Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy. But a small group of film buffs is reviving Blockbuster nostalgia one front yard at a time. They’re setting up little movie libraries where people can drop off and pick up DVDs, and they’re calling them Free Blockbusters. Anisa Vietze has this story.

ANISA VIETZE, BYLINE: On a recent sunny morning in Anchorage, Tom Shelby stood in front of an old newspaper box in a front yard, paging through DVDs.

TOM SHELBY: Oh, man. There’s some old-school stuff in here, like the original “Superman” series, “Rambo” – seen that – “Captain Marvel.”

VIETZE: The box is painted with the words Free Blockbuster in the iconic blue and yellow colors of the almost obsolete video rental store. There’s just one left in Bend, Oregon. At the free one, you can take or leave a movie. You don’t even have to return it.

SHELBY: Ooh. Michelle Pfeiffer and George Clooney – my wife might like that.

VIETZE: DVDs might seem superfluous now with streaming, but Shelby has a practical reason to hang onto them. There are still many homes in Alaska that don’t have reliable internet, and Shelby’s family cabin out in Willow is one of them.

SHELBY: It’s pretty spotty coverage, and the grandkids want to watch Disney movies that we might have. And so we, you know, have a library of that stuff. And we just brought that all out to the cabin.

VIETZE: This Free Blockbuster was put up this summer by local filmmaker Matt Jardin. For him personally, it’s not about practicality.

MATT JARDIN: It kind of harkens back to an old way of discovering movies. You know, of course, with a Free Blockbuster, it’s – you’re not really able to walk down any hallways. But, you know, if we could carve out, you know, just a tiny, tiny slice of that nostalgia, then great.

VIETZE: These Free Blockbusters have been popping up all over the country in the past few years. According to the Free Blockbuster website, over 200 have been put up across 43 states.

BRIAN MORRISON: I still think of this, on some level, as a big, collective art installation.

VIETZE: That’s Brian Morrison, who started the Free Blockbuster project. Morrison worked at a Blockbuster store in high school. He put up the first Free Blockbuster in LA in 2019, after he realized that DVDs and VHS tapes were going to waste. He says as the project has grown, he’s constantly surprised at the creativity people pour into making their own Free Blockbusters.

MORRISON: Someone has made some beautiful thing somewhere in the world or even somewhere in my own neighborhood. Someone made a beautiful new Free Blockbuster, made it by their own hands, and it’s right down the street.

VIETZE: Morrison started the Free Blockbuster website where people can download the logo and put their location on a map. Until this year, they used the old Blockbuster logo, but he says they stopped after a lawyer for DISH Network, which owns the Blockbuster brand, asked them to. The new logo is a rewound VHS tape.

MORRISON: We are not using the torn ticket logo, which is a trademark of Blockbuster, LLC.

VIETZE: DISH Network did not respond to a request for comment. Morrison believes the project is about more than just nostalgia. He says discovering movies out in the real world serves to connect us. People go to the Blockbuster with their families, or they meet neighbors.

MORRISON: The thing that’s really interesting to me is the young people, the children, who don’t have nostalgia, and they still love the activity. They love to come to the Free Blockbuster and find something they’ve never seen before. And that thrill of discovery, absent nostalgia, is what says to me this is not a project about looking at the past. It’s a project about looking at the future.

VIETZE: Morrison, of course, has a Free Blockbuster in his own yard. He hopes it’ll stay open for browsing and connecting for many years to come. For NPR News, I’m Anisa Vietze, in Anchorage.

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