I have been a devoted member of Blockbuster for YEARS now (since 1998, I believe) and even more so when they started their Blockbuster By Mail service back in 2006-ish. This program was the best, especially for people like me who could not return a movie on time to save their lives.
Here is how it worked: I would add movies to a queue and the top three on my list would get sent to me in the mail. I could keep them as long as I would like, then take them back to my local Blockbuster store and exchange them for three in-store movies which I could keep as long as I liked. I then would return them back to the store and three more mail-in movies would be sent to me. I could do this an unlimited amount of times for a fixed monthly payment of $20.99. NO LATE FEES!! If I watched the three mail-ins quickly and then ran out to the store to get three exchanges and watch those quickly and returned them, I could seriously watch a ton of movies! Of course, having a LOT of other things going on in my life, watching that many movies is just not possible. So, some months I'd lose out while other months I make a steal. To keep my queue list going, I would go to the coolest trailer website I've ever come across:
www.traileraddict.com
I could browse all kinds of trailers (old, current, and coming soon) and then search for those movies through Blockbuster.com. I believe, at one point, I had over 100 movies in my queue! lol Not that I ever intended on watching them all, it was just nice to have a variety of options. However, Blockbuster decided to close all of its brick-and-mortar stores and go strictly with streaming to compete with such companies as NETFLIX and HULU. The mail-in program shut down earlier this month. As silly as this may sound, I was incredibly sad about this! This has been my source for keeping up with the movies for so long now! :(
However, as the quote goes by Clint Eastwood in one of my old-time favorite movies "Heartbreak Ridge" - "improvise, adapt, overcome!" So, improvise, adapt, and overcome I have! I finally decided to check out Redbox, since I see them all over the place:
www.redbox.com
It works a lot like Blockbuster did as far as searching for movies and adding them to a queue (they call it "wish list"). The prices are great at only $1.27 per movie. This is a third of the price of an in-store rental from a Blockbuster store! And if I am having a slow movie watching month, I will save a lot of money in the long haul by not having a monthly fee! However, there are a couple of drawbacks to this - you only get it for one day, then you start incurring late fees (bad news for me!). Also, you have to search online for a Redbox location that is actually carrying the movie you are looking for. Sometimes you'll luck out when it's available at a box that is right around the corner from you, sometimes you'll find yourself driving across town, and sometimes you'll be just plum out of luck. Redbox's library of movies is based on new releases or very popular movies, which is another drawback. Sometimes I enjoy finding a movie that barely got advertised and went straight to DVD. Most of those movies tend to be transparent for a reason (they're TERRIBLE!), but every once and a while you find one that STUNS you the fact that it didn't get enough recognition! Blockbuster's movie database was quite extensive when it comes to finding movies like those!
Nevertheless, I am going to give Redbox a try for the first time today. My first movie selection will be "Parkland", a movie based on the JFK assassination.
http://www.traileraddict.com/trailer/parkland/trailer
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