The Last Blockbuster

By Mike Ruffin

I was a professor at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee in the 1990s. We had a university-wide faculty meeting just before the beginning of each new school year. The president of the university would address us.

One year—it was probably 1994 or 1995—he said something like this: “Blockbuster Video is one of the great success stories of our time. And it will be gone in ten years.” He said this would happen because people would get their movies by other means, such as through delivery to their computers. I don’t remember him using the word “streaming,” but that’s what he was talking about.