It's Not a Video Store Revival. It's a Revolution!

Surely you’ve heard about the craze—it’s global. Independent bookshops are on the rise, classic video stores are popping up left and right, and people are buying dumb phones again. That’s right, phones without an internet connection. The ‘90s are back in full swing—that special, final era of time before the internet overtook our entire way of life.

It makes sense that we’re nostalgic for those days. No notification dings and bings and buzzes, no pop-ups and skip-ads and alerts. The twin towers stood tall and Bezos was still contained in a little garage in Seattle. What a time to be alive!

According to a new NBC News Division poll, 47% of Gen Z wishes they could live in the past. Yep, that’s right—nearly half of the first generation born after the existence of the internet wants to live in a time before its invention.

Nostalgic movements come and go, but I’d like to argue that this one bears an imperative to survive unlike any fleeting trend that has come before. The future of indie film, democracy, and the free world might depend on it.

Hear me out.

In the 1990s, every step and breath we took wasn’t digitally tracked or hacked. Our individual likes, purchases, travels and conversations weren’t chopped up into endlessly exploitable data points being sold off to third party marketers for god-knows-what nefarious purpose.

On a recent detour to a record store, I came across “Every Breath You Take” by The Police. While it was the biggest song of 1983, the lyrics feel like an anthem for 2026. Even Sting didn’t realize just how sinister it is at its core: “I think I was thinking of Big Brother, surveillance and control. These were the Reagan, Star Wars years,” he later recalled to Interview Magazine.

Ah, the ‘80s … The Police were a band on MTV, not the deranged, ski-masked thugs of 2026, yanking civilians out of their cars and putting bullets in the heads of school moms or nurses for standing in their way. “Every Breath You Take” was just a song. It wasn’t the business model of Palantir, rummaging through your devices and synthesizing everything you’ve ever done online into a tidy profile to sell to the government. Those steps you invite Apple to track, those breathing patterns you ask your Oura ring monitor … Yep, the police now have a summary of “every move you make” in 2026.

While a lot of us vote, all of us have to spend. What we do with our cash matters. If you prefer the old days, here are some ideas to resurrect a more independent time.

Revolutionary Act #1: Go To a Video Store

For me, the most quintessential activity of the ‘80s or ‘90s was a stop at my local video store—remember those? Usually in a strip mall, downtown shop, or inside a grocery store, you could walk through rows and rows of movies, all the hottest new releases on display and ready to be checked out. You could physically pick them up and judge it by its cover or a review from Siskel & Ebert. And there was usually somebody standing next to you ready to give you their personal take—“that’s a good one ...” “Oh yeah?” An unexpected conversation with a stranger ensued.

Back then, a random stranger’s review was usually correct. More often than not, it was a good one. Most of those movies you watched at home on a Saturday night were era-defining works of art from filmmakers like Rob Reiner, David Lynch, John Singleton, Penny Marshall, John Hughes, Nora Ephron (anybody familiar with the era can probably relate to a scene out of another 90s classic, “Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery,” specifically when he makes a list of “People I Know” and crosses off the deceased one by one—Kleenex anyone?).

By the early 2000s, I thought I had acquired enough qualifications to finally land a job at a corporate video store. I confidently walked in and filled out the paper application while the manager watched on. It felt like more pressure than the SATs. True or false: “It’s okay to steal candy from your employer.” False! I’m gonna nail this. True or false: “If you see another employee stealing candy, you should tell the manager.” True! The manager takes my completed test and says they can let me know ASAP how I did. A couple minutes later, they regretted to inform me I scored a C+, below their threshold for new hires. I was gutted. To this day, I’m still confused. I was supposed to steal candy?

Years later, in a world now run by Silicon Valley, you could imagine my excitement to stumble upon a real-life, old school video store. It happened recently in Burbank, California. Local legend, Matthew Renoir, has dedicated himself to bringing the classic video store back from the dead, living on in his throwback store, Be Kind Video. Thanks in part to his film preservationist background and his family’s historic contributions to the arts, Renoir gifts his lucky community with a time-traveling experience. All the VHS tapes of that pre-internet era live on there, waiting to be discovered for the first time by the hoards of Gen Zers shuffling in on a random Thursday afternoon.

Renoir’s obviously not the first to revive the video store, and he’s certainly not alone. The movement is alive because of the visionaries behind Vidiots in Eagle Rock, Whammy! in Silver Lake, Night Owl in Brooklyn, Movie Madness in Portland, The VU in Boston, and so many others. The list is strong and growing all around the world.

But can nostalgia alone sustain the business model, or will Big Tech win again, swallowing them up or knocking them out once the trend passes?

Revolutionary Act #2: Block The Merger

Allow me to interject my own adventure with a business idea from a bygone era—the drive-in movie theatre. The year is 2020. My cousin and I are remotely monitoring the humungous screen we built for our very own drive-in, The Nightlight. As we plow through our stock of Hot Tamales, I discover that eating candy is a part of the job—lesson learned.

About 30 cars and pickup trucks are camped out in our dirt lot watching a Kevin Costner baseball movie from 1989. It was true—if you build it, they will come. Nobody seemed to need anything more than a portable, battery-operated FM radio be perfectly content on those summer nights. We ran Farrelly Brothers comedies, horror classics and Disney crowd-pleasers to a steady audience looking to revisit this other blissfully internet-free era.

But in the background, Hollywood was crumbling. “Tech disruption” feels like one hell of an understatement for the tsunami that obliterated the century-old, famously impenetrable studio system in the matter of a few chaotic years. Today, only one man is left standing, the son of Larry Ellison, the Oracle billionaire who just moved his primary residence to a $173 million Florida mansion nine miles from Mar-a-Lago.

Larry’s son, David, likes fiction, specifically a story he invented about 70% of the U.S. preferring “centrist” content, an imaginary statistic that defines his company’s conservative programming decisions. When I say his company is the only one standing, I mean it literally—David is set to own TikTok, Paramount Studios, CBS Studios, Warner Bros., HBO, CNN, DC Comics, Avatar Studios, Comedy Central, the Lord of the Rings, Mission: Impossible, "Star Trek” and Harry Potter franchises … I’m summarizing for space here—the list is disturbingly much longer.

As it stands, all the Larry Ellisons and David Zaslovs and Shari Redstones of this world will float on yachts around Billionaire Bunker in Florida while the rest of us are obeying orders and staying silent for fear of winding up down the road at Alligator Alcatraz. With our media controlled by the smallest number of conglomerates in history, and those sycophants at the complete and total mercy of the White House, freedom of speech will become whatever they allow us to watch, whatever they decide to commission and censor.

“Oh, can’t you see? You belong to me …”

This should piss all of us off enough to galvanize and join the growing call to #BlockTheMerger with the heartiest counter-punch possible. Add your name here!

Revolutionary Act #3: Watch “Chuck Norris vs. Communism”

Here’s my movie pick of the week: Chuck Norris vs. Communism.

Premiering at Sundance in 2015, this documentary relives the oppressive 1980s regime of communist Romania, when an underground movement of “smuggled VHS tapes of banned Hollywood films become an inspirational ray of hope.” The film’s premise suggests that it was the intense reactions to those smuggled Hollywood films that propelled people to lead the country through a liberating revolution in 1989. Top Gun wasn’t just a blockbuster to them—it was a portal into the Western world. Before Back to the Future, Romanians hadn’t seen a DeLorean. Finally getting a glimpse outside their tightly-controlled, state-run media was earth-shattering, and revolutionary.

Movies matter. Independence matters. Freedom to watch stuff matters.

Watch this film, however you can. No, it’s not on Amazon. I tracked down one of the last copies thanks to Josh Shafer, the Head Videovore at Lunchmeat VHS, one of the only places on Earth still printing on VHS.

There are a lot of lost gems out there that you can’t find on Amazon. Former Sundance programmers, Ash Cook and Aidan Dick, are trying to do something to address this gap in the market with their new startup, Video Store•Age, a novel concept to bring the DVD into the modern era with USB drives, giving us anti-Amazoners a new way to future-proof our own personalized collections of physical media.

I’m hoping they’ll find a clever way to bring Chuck Norris vs. Communism to U.S. audiences. Americans could stand to learn a lot from another country that roared like Rocky and managed to overthrow the state’s propaganda machine.

Revolutionary Act #4: Break Up With Big Tech

Pioneers like Renoir, Shafer and Ash & Aidan aren’t just guessing that audiences want to get their hands on physical copies of indies—the statistics back them up.

In 2024, Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center completed a comprehensive study proving, among other things, that millions of Americans want to watch more indie films. “More than 4 in 10 Americans say they would see more independent and documentary film if they were available. That’s more than say they are fans of indie film, roughly 111 million people.” Furthermore, AMC Theaters 2024 data shows that independent films captured a box office share of 31%—larger than in prior years.

Wall Street, did you catch that figure? It’s a huge market share.

NYU Marketing Professor, Scott Galloway, launched the #ResistAndUnsubscribe movement earlier this year to demonstrate just how effective boycotts continue to be, especially under totalitarian regimes like ours (Pedro Almodovar’s words, not mine). He believes if we resist and unsubscribe from monthly tech subscriptions, we can send a strong message to Wall Street that we’re sick of this shit. We don’t want David Ellison in charge of our entertainment. We want variety. We want the freedom to walk into a store and pick up an independently produced movie for ourselves.

If we shift our monthly subscription dollars away from Big Tech and toward rentals at your video store or tickets to an arthouse cinema, we can re-calibrate this increasingly authoritarian world back to that special, pre-internet time when we had more personal liberties, and better movies.

“Every bond we break …” is a win for independence. #ResistAndUnsubscribe

Revolutionary Act #5: Create Our Own Merger with #AskTheAudience

Filmmakers and critics, festival programmers and distributors, celebrities and influencers, video store owners and arthouse cinemas: unite!

If you’re a fan of indie film and lucky enough to have a local video store, ask the clerk if they’ll dedicate more shelf space for truly independent movies. And if they dare, maybe they’d feature some Non-Dē movies fresh off the production line as well?

Not familiar? Here’s one of Ted Hope’s breakdowns of the rising film movement.

If you call yourself a filmmaker, go talk to the people renting physical movies—your audience is standing there in the flesh. Ask them what they’re renting this weekend and why. Nobody should go to the colossal effort of making a movie without knowing exactly who’s going to watch it. Genius film analyst Stephen Follows breaks down precisely why this matters here. #AskTheAudience

Calling all Hollywood heavyweights. We know who you are—more than 2200 of you have added your super well-known names to the #BlockTheMerger movement. Do more please. Walk into your favorite independent cinema and ask them if you could personally put up an #AskTheAudience suggestion box at the concession stand. Say you want to hear from the people showing up to watch the truly independent, quicky and off-beat rarities they’re still sell tickets for.

I could be wrong, but I doubt the box will be full of requests for more sequels and remakes and comic book movies.

Go back in a month to collect the box, then read the best ideas on your social channels. I guarantee you at least one kick-ass filmmaker will step forward with an original script based on the suggestions. The dominoes might fall from there, and maybe one day soon, we’ll see freshly-made, original movies on the shelves of video stores again.

Long live the indie spirit of the ‘90s, long live the revolution!

*Feature image by Sami (Adobe)