The world's last Blockbuster releases a new Super Bowl commercial — but seeing it might be tricky
- The last Blockbuster in the world in Bend, Oregon, has teased a Super Bowl commercial on its Instagram.
- The posts tease an ad called "Blockbuster: Until the Bitter End," and have had a post-apocalyptic theme.
The last surviving Blockbuster on the planet has released a commercial during the Super Bowl, but you might need a VCR to watch it.
If not a VCR, an Instagram or YouTube account likely will do. The last Blockbuster, in Bend, Oregon, has been teasing the upcoming ad on Instagram for the last few weeks. During Rihanna's headline making halftime show, the store released Blockbuster's first ad in over a decade on Instagram Live.
But if you were too captivated by Rihanna's performance and speculation that the star is pregnant, the store also has you covered. The ad became available on YouTube shortly after the livestream ended.
The ad follows a cockroach through a post-apocalyptic landscape as a voiceover claims that after the world ends, and streaming is gone forever, Blockbuster will remain. The cockroach enters the video rental store through the automatic doors, and is greeted with "Hey Steve!" by a friendly employee.
The insect chirps and skitters away as upbeat techno plays and a message claims that the world's last Blockbuster will continue renting your favorite films "until the bitter end."
On January 31, the store posted the first teaser image of a post-apocalyptic scene on an old TV, with a giant cockroach sitting on top of a Blockbuster.
But instead of paying millions to debut the ad during the aired Super Bowl like many companies — some more successfully than others — the last Blockbuster had a different plan. In another teaser posted Thursday, the store announced that the commercial would be available to rent in the store beginning Sunday, and on the store's Instagram.
A new shirt related to the ad also was added to its existing merchandise.
The store's general manager, Sandi Harding, told CNN Business that the store has been getting excited calls since the teasers were first posted.
"I wanted to do two things with the ad. One was to show that small businesses can also do creative and fun things for the Super Bowl, and it's not just an opportunity for the big companies and their big ads," Harding told CNN. "We also want people to remember us, that we are here and our store is exactly the way a Blockbuster store was in the 1990s."
In the 1990s, Blockbuster was a household name, renting out movies and video games on VHS tapes, then DVDs, to millions across over 9,000 stores in the US. But with the increase of live programming on cable TV, rental services like Netflix, and the advent of streaming, the video giant was forced into bankruptcy by 2010.
The Bend, Oregon, store has operated as the last Blockbuster since 2019, when the second to last store in Australia permanently closed. Even with just one store left, the nostalgia of the '90s icon lives on in other ways, like the Blockbuster pop-up bar in Los Angeles toured by Danielle Bauter for Insider in December.