Think the video rental store is dead? Meet the Passyunk Square couple who want to prove you wrong

Passyunk Square resident Dylan Wise was talking with a friend about the Strait of Hormuz — the contested Persian Gulf shipping chokepoint that has been central to the United States’ ongoing tensions with Iran — when he got the wild idea of opening a video store.

“I was talking to someone about the strait,” he remembers. “And I thought, ‘I’m an idiot. I shouldn’t have an opinion on that. Why do I even know about this?’ I need to get a little more myopic. I need to focus on myself, and my family, and my community.”

And his way of doing that was to open the Little Movie Store in South Philadelphia.

Opening a video rental business in 2026 can seem a little foolhardy. They were once a staple of communities across the country — in 2000, the Video Software Dealers Association census tallied nearly 28,000 video rental storefronts in the United States, per Billboard.

But today, the video store is now about as defunct as, well, the videotape.

Blame the rise, and subsequent tumble, of big chains like Blockbuster, which bullied mom-and-pop stores out of business before collapsing themselves. Blame the Netflix mail-order rental model, which ended in 2023, and the ascent of at-home streaming platforms. Blame the financial pressures of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The video store is no longer a salable retail model or community space where cinephilia is nurtured and lifelong passions for the so-called “seventh art” take root. These shops are now more typically spoken of in the past tense, and are the subject of eulogies, odes, and nostalgic paeans to times gone by.

Wise and his partner (in business and in life), Keri Wise, hope to change that. At least in their corner of the world.

“It is a wave that’s happening,” said Dylan Wise, brimming with the optimism of a small-business owner who is also a true believer. “I can feel it in the air. The physical media resurgence.”

The Wises looked at a number of retail spaces along Passyunk Avenue, but had difficulty persuading landlords that their video store and physical media retail idea was viable. Their current landlord, who lives above the store, was considering turning the space into a cafe, but worried it wouldn’t have a big enough footprint.

Wise eventually put together what he regarded as a “solid business plan,” and was able to persuade the landlord. Keri Wise already has experience managing retail spaces in Boston and New York City, where the couple lived before moving to Philly in 2020, during the peak of the COVID pandemic.

“This is a huge decision for us,” said Wise. “I see comments on our Instagram saying, ‘Oh, what could go wrong?’ I always think, what could go right! You think we didn’t think through this? Of course we did!”

The Wises believe that their Little Movie Store can follow the template set by bookstores and record shops, which have benefited from a renewed interest both in nondigital media consumption and in-person interactions.

In addition to selling and renting movies (using a subscription model, where for $160/year customers can rent up to three movies at a time), the Wises are planning to host screenings and even curate a little nook with a coffee table and coloring books to entertain neighborhood youngsters, while their parents peruse the shelves of Blu-rays, DVDs, and even VHS cassettes.

“Every Friday night my family would go pick out our movies,” Keri Wise remembered fondly. “We’d eat on the couch, and have a few movies to watch. It’s a deep memory. When I talk to other people in the neighborhood, they all tell me they can’t wait to come and look around, and bring their kids.”

For her, owning the store is about curating an interesting collection of physical media. The Little Movie Store has already collected 5,000 titles: everything from new releases from boutique Blu-ray labels like Arrow Video and the Criterion Collection, to a whole collection of old-school Warner Bros. snap-case DVDs. The titles were largely amassed from donations from social media followers, who were hip to their mission and eager to chip in. They also came from private collections, including one belonging to a former video store owner.

The Little Movie Store is not totally without precedent. While cavernous Blockbusters offering walls of Hangover 2 rentals may have come and gone, smaller video rental shops have sprouted across the country. There’s Scarecrow Video in Seattle, Beyond Video in Baltimore, and Night Owl Video in Brooklyn, to name a few.

A nascent network of revivalists has emerged, providing business (and emotional) support to one another.

“There’s enough new video stores popping up that we’re now in an Instagram group chat with one another,” said Wise. “We’re talking about what’s working, what’s not working, and how we’re handling certain problems.”

Some of these problems include a point-of-sale software from the ‘90s that only runs on outdated operating systems.

More than pure nostalgia, the Wises believe that physical media sales and rentals respond to a new problem that has been created by the ever-more-sprawling digital media landscape.

Anyone in the mood to watch a movie at home has had the experience of cycling through potential titles across half a dozen streaming platforms, from Netflix to Amazon Prime to Tubi and Shudder and Paramount and the Criterion Channel, before tuckering out and just heading to bed. The sheer accessibility, and frictionless ease, of watching a movie at home has itself become a dilemma.

There is, simply, too much to watch.

“Why is the algorithm deciding what I’m going to watch?” Wise said. “That’s why we want a store: to have a place for people to see each other, and hang out, and pick a movie together, and take recommendations.”

“These are real, physical things that you can hold, and touch — and smell, if you want. It’s not nostalgia for a thing. It’s nostalgia for a slower way of living.”

The Little Movie Store is located at 2001 S. 10th St., Phila. instagram.com/littlemoviestore