The Death of Movie Night

There was a time when finding something to watch was an event.

Not a passive scroll. Not a “What do you want to put on?” grunt from across the couch. Not a half-watched movie playing in the background while you doomscroll TikToks and fall asleep with your phone on your chest.

I’m talking about a Friday night ritual. A sacred rite of passage. You didn’t stream your weekend, you planned it. You walked into a video store and tried to find something that would make your whole week worth it. And sometimes you got lucky. Sometimes you didn’t. But either way, you chose.

Now that ritual’s gone. And maybe that’s what I miss the most, not the tapes, not the store, but the act of choosing.

The Joy Was in the Ritual

You remember how it worked.

The family piles into the car. Or maybe it’s you and your girlfriend, your brother, your best friend. You enter the store and split off like RPG characters in a dungeon crawl.

• Dad heads to action.

• Mom checks for something “based on a true story” or the rom-com (your mom experience may vary).

• You beeline to the horror wall, hoping something new came back in the returns bin.

• Someone always ends up by the candy boxes like it’s a secondary mission.

You negotiated movie night. You pitched. You argued. You compromised. You pleaded your case like a sweaty little trial lawyer holding up a copy of Army of Darkness.

And when the pick was made, that was it. No takebacks. You took that tape home, you popped popcorn, and you committed. Even if it sucked. Even if it was weird. You watched it all.

Because you earned it.

And It Wasn’t Just Movies

This wasn’t just about VHS. This was a whole era of ritualized identity shopping.

Bookstores. Record shops. Comic stores. CD bins at Tower. The magazine rack at the corner bodega. You walked in with nothing and walked out with yourself, or at least a piece of who you wanted to be that week.

You didn’t have curated feeds. You had vibes. Gut instinct. A handwritten staff pick that said, “Trust me, this gets weird by chapter three.” That was enough.

You explored. You tried. You found things.

And you were changed.

The Places Were Part of the Magic

We didn’t just lose the rituals – we lost the places that held them.

Blockbuster wasn’t just a store. Tower Records wasn’t just a music shop. Borders wasn’t just where you got your summer reading list. These were hubs. Landmarks. Midpoints in your week. Places to wander on lunch breaks, after school, on first dates. You’d walk in looking to kill time and walk out with something that would stay with you forever.

Now? Malls are mausoleums of what used to matter. Nothing but sneakers, fast fashion, and phone repair kiosks. No wonder they feel hollow.

We didn’t just buy media we inhabited it. And that kind of space? You can’t recreate it with a recommendation engine.

When Convenience Won, Something Else Died

Netflix by mail still felt like choosing. You built a queue. You waited. There was excitement in that little red envelope.

Then came streaming. Then came instant. Then came everything, all the time.

And slowly, the chase died.

We don’t hunt anymore. We scroll. We stop ten minutes in. We let content wash over us instead of stepping into it. We consume while multitasking, background noise for a dozen other things.

And worst of all, we stopped doing it together.

No more group decisions. No more couple debates in the aisles. No more communal “Let’s watch this.” Just quiet, side-by-side isolation, each person locked into their own feed, their own earbuds, their own little screen.

We’re full. But we’re not satisfied.

What We Really Lost

We like to say we miss video stores.

But it wasn’t just the stores. It wasn’t even the tapes.

It was the ritual.

It was the browsing. The pitching. The little arguments in public over whether we were really in the mood for horror. It was the smell of cardboard and popcorn butter. It was bumping into someone by the returns shelf and whispering, “Is that one any good?”

It was sitting in the car afterward, holding the tape in your lap, already imagining the night ahead.

And it wasn’t just movies. We lost the objects too.

We lost box art – the bold, weird, often ridiculous covers that shouted at us from shelves and told half the story before we even hit play. We lost albums with covers we hung on our walls like sacred posters. We lost game boxes packed with instruction booklets and lore-stuffed maps. Things we held, admired, and shared.

Now it’s all flat. Frictionless. Disconnected.

We had rituals; Friday night movie hunts, record store treasure hunts, bookstore escapes. These weren’t chores. They were how we found meaning. They were where we figured out who we were.

Now we just scroll…

We used to show up with intention. Now we drift with distraction.

We used to browse together. Now we consume alone.

We used to shop for ourselves.

And whether we knew it or not, every time we held something in our hands and said, Let’s go with this one, we were choosing more than a movie.

We were choosing each other.