Some have predicted the death of Blockbuster for several years. This company will be around long after the death of video stores. And they will be here for atleast a decade or better.

People were predicting the death of indie video stores long before I opened mine. Yes, Adventureland Video come to life about a decade ago. For this reason, I had lots of skeptics... and still do.

My brick & mortar store died because I was young & stupid. Yes, my market was small and demographic was aging.  The truth is, with better management, it would be there today -- renting DVDs & video games.

Blockbuster Charts Course to Digital Age
 
Nov 17, 5:43 AM (ET)

By DAVID KOENIG
 
DALLAS (AP) - In his corner office 32 floors above downtown, Blockbuster CEO James Keyes pulls out his phone and starts up last year's Oscar winner, "Crash," to demonstrate his vision of the movie-rental giant's future.

Customers, he said, will someday soon go to kiosks in Blockbuster stores to burn movies on to a disk or download them directly to phones or other devices.

Technology is usually seen as Blockbuster Inc.'s enemy. Why would anyone drive to a store when they can order online and have movies mailed to their home or transmitted straight to their television set by video on demand?

Keyes said store rentals will be an important part of the business for at least five more years. And if Blockbuster can remain the world's biggest movie-rental company during that time, it will be in stronger position to lead when viewers routinely download films, he said.
 
"This is an industry in transition and a company that hasn't been able to keep up with that change," said Keyes, named CEO in July. "But Blockbuster is one of the best-known brands in the world. We've just got to find ways to use technology to make the company more relevant."

With nearly 8,000 stores, Blockbuster is synonymous with renting movies. But it lost more than $4 billion from 2002 through 2005. The Dallas-based company eked out a $54 million profit in 2006, but it lost money amid further sales declines in the first nine months of this year.

In an Associated Press interview, Keyes outlined steps the company will take by early next year as part of a plan to shore up its rental business and increase retail sales:

- In the next few months, Blockbuster will test new store layouts with kids' areas and beverage bars. It will also test "various forms of price increase," including incentives to return DVDs sooner - although Keyes was careful not to call them late fees.

- Some stores will get kiosks that eventually could be used to download movies, although their functions will be more limited at first.

- Using a movie-download company that it just bought, Blockbuster will begin transmitting movies to customers' PCs.

- The chain will test new sales of small electronic devices, soundtrack CDs and books to reduce its dependence on the stagnant movie-rental business.

Allen Klose, a former Blockbuster marketing executive, said the company has had mixed success with previous efforts to sell products, going back to the mid-1990s. He said the company hasn't changed consumers' expectation that Blockbuster is just a place to rent movies.

Keyes, a former 7-Eleven Inc. CEO, will also have to steer the $5.5 billion company around immediate dangers, including financial losses, junk-status debt, and a setback in its mail-delivery rental business.

Last week, Keyes got his first chance to explain his vision of Blockbuster to investors at a meeting in New York.

It did not go well, judging from the stock market reaction.

Blockbuster shares dropped 17 percent in three days, to around $4 - about the price of a 2-day movie rental.

Analysts said Keyes did a poor job of explaining how the company will overcome short-term challenges.

It's hard to think of a major U.S. corporation whose demise has been predicted more often than Blockbuster. Since peaking in 2004, Blockbuster's sales have slipped each year, and same-store rentals eroded.

Executives often blamed a weak lineup of movies released on DVD, but that didn't explain how Netflix Inc. grew into a 7-million subscriber competitor by taking rental orders on the Internet for mail delivery.

Blockbuster built its own mail-delivery service. But the heavy investment sapped profits and led to an unusual public fight between then-CEO John Antioco and the company's largest shareholder, Carl Icahn.

Antioco left, and other recent departures include the chief financial officer, chief operating officer, general counsel and the manager of the online business.

Keyes said some of Blockbuster's problems were self-inflicted, especially its decision nearly three years ago to eliminate most late fees. The fees once accounted for nearly one-fifth of Blockbuster's revenue, but customers hated them.

Without the onerous late fees, however, customers held on to movies longer - 5 days on average now, up from 3.6 days. That means Blockbuster can't re-rent popular titles as often, and store shelves are stripped bare of new releases.

Another misstep, Keyes said, was trying too hard to catch up to Netflix. Blockbuster launched a similar service called Total Access, then let subscribers get an unlimited number of free rentals simply by taking their movies back to a store instead of returning them by mail.

Blockbuster figures the freebies cost it $29 million in the third quarter. So many Total Access customers took advantage of the all-you-can-watch feature that the chain's average payment per rental fell to $2.79, nearly a dollar less than in 2004.

One of Keyes' first actions as CEO was to limit the free in-store exchanges unless customers paid an extra $7 per month. Blockbuster lost 500,000 online subscribers over the summer, leaving it with 3.1 million.

Keyes also closed a deal that Antioco had started by acquiring video-downloading service Movielink from a group of Hollywood studios. Movielink lost $10 million on revenue of just $2 million in the first six months of this year, but Keyes said Blockbuster gained digital rights to 6,000 movie and TV show titles.

Arvind Bhatia, an analyst for Sterne, Agee & Leach, said the movie studios tried to sell Movielink for more than $50 million, but Blockbuster ended up buying it for $7.7 million.

"That begs the question where is the (movie-downloading) market today, and how well do the studios see it developing?" Bhatia said. "The answer is, probably not much."

Michael Pachter, an analyst for Wedbush Morgan Securities and bullish on Blockbuster, said DVD rentals will be Blockbuster's backbone for much longer than expected - maybe 10 to 15 years - because movie studios will resist downloads, which are less profitable for them than selling and renting DVDs.

Pachter believes Keyes and Chief Financial Officer Thomas M. Casey need to focus more on Blockbuster's short-term issues and do a better job explaining their strategy to Wall Street.

"They need to say 'Rental is here to stay, and we're going to be profitable next quarter,'" the analyst said. "These guys just aren't particularly practiced at articulating a near-term strategy. That makes people sell the stock and ask questions later."

The chains will replace DVD with hi-def DVD while adopting digital downloads. How soon will depend on 3 factors. They are copyright laws, copy protection and availability of broadband.

To put it bluntly, the working poor like myself would hate to lose our movies. And we are not going away because someone has to pay America's bill. Thus a nitche exists for us moms and pops.

Did you know we have of the slowest and costliest broadband connections in the world? America made the internet. Now we are trying to stunt its growth.

- Paul

When I found this, I just had to share it. Here are capsulated reviews for this week's movies. I am not sure this a good week for movies.

Capsule Reviews of This Week's Films
 
Nov 14, 6:33 PM (ET)

Capsule reviews of films opening this week:

"BEOWULF" - The title alone will inspire painful memories of high-school English class and pangs of dread. Never fear. This 3-D animated "Beowulf" is more like "300," only with more violence, if that's possible. And nudity - lots and lots of nudity. Director Robert Zemeckis, using the same performance-capture technology he introduced with 2004's "The Polar Express," takes on the epic Old English poem by sexing it up. The film follows the mythic Viking hero who emerges from the sea to rid a Danish kingdom of the bloody, gooey, raging, pus-covered monster, Grendel. Only then can there be much merrymaking and mead-drinking and wench-bedding. The 3-D effects are extremely cool - and "Beowulf" is also being shown in IMAX 3-D, if your brain can stand it. The way stuff comes at you and seems to come out of nowhere from behind you makes you feel as if you're fully immersed. But then the characters look distractingly fake, as if they're made of wax. The storied Beowulf is played with a growl and a roar and very little clothing by Ray Winstone, though the character on screen looks nothing like Ray Winstone. Everyone else resembles the actors playing them: Anthony Hopkins, John Malkovich, Robin Wright Penn, Brendan Gleeson and especially Angelina Jolie as Grendel's powerfully seductive mother. Unless you're a fantasy geek, though, it's hard to take all that swordplay and dragon slaying seriously. Depicted today, this comes off as a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of undeserved fame. Beowulf could be Paris Hilton. PG-13 for intense sequences of violence including disturbing images, some sexual material and nudity. 113 min. Two and a half stars out of four.

- Christy Lemire, AP Movie Critic

LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA" - Much of the great joy of reading an author like Gabriel Garcia Marquez is the fact that you're reading him - that you're allowing yourself to become engrossed in his florid phrasing and vivid descriptions, that he's offering to take you to a fully realized place and you're succumbing, gladly. When a writer's voice is as distinctive as the Colombian Nobel Prize winner's, it's difficult to replicate it on screen, even though director Mike Newell and screenwriter Ronald Harwood remain largely faithful to Garcia Marquez' sweeping 1985 novel about a decades-old romantic obsession. Harwood won an Academy Award for his adaptation of "The Pianist"; here, he maintains much of the original dialogue, but the meaning and emotion behind it is often strangely lacking. So when the elegant Dr. Juvenal Urbino (Benjamin Bratt) assures his virgin bride (Giovanna Mezzogiorno) on their honeymoon, "This is going to be a lesson in love," a line that might have seemed palatable on the page instead clangs on the ear. Similarly, the lovesick Florentino Ariza, insufficiently fleshed out, comes off as a crazed stalker, a guy who needs to get a life (as well as a sturdier stomach) even though he's played by Javier Bardem, who has a great capacity for subtlety. As Fermina Daza, the woman Florentino adores for more than 50 years, Mezzogiorno is distractingly miscast: lovely, yes, but too old to play Fermina as a teenager and too young to play her as a gray-haired widow. R for sexual content/nudity and brief language. 138 min. One and a half stars out of four.

- Christy Lemire, AP Movie Critic

"MR. MAGORIUM'S WONDER EMPORIUM" - You'd have to be a really little kid - we're talking young enough to be enthralled by colorful, shiny objects and oblivious to the necessity of character development - to fall for this toy story. With wild hair and an annoying accent, Dustin Hoffman looks completely uncomfortable as the titular impresario, a childlike eccentric who doesn't just sell toys but whose store is a living being with feelings. Now, at age 243, he decides it's time to leave (read: die, inexplicably) and hand the keys over to store manager Molly Mahoney (Natalie Portman in full-on pixie mode), a former piano prodigy who's stuck creatively. (Ah, the irony - she works at a place that encourages creativity!) The whole endeavor feels like the love child of Willy Wonka and Pee-Wee Herman. It's totally one-note in its incessant whimsy, except for those few moments when it treads awkwardly toward the topic of death. The most curious part is that this tongue-twister of a movie comes from writer-director Zach Helm, who previously wrote the clever, charming "Stranger Than Fiction" starring Will Ferrell (and co-starring Hoffman, much more effectively). The comic skills of Jason Bateman are wasted in the role of an uptight accountant who's come to assess the store's worth. Zach Mills shows some precocious likability as a 9-year-old with a hat fetish who visits the store daily because he has no friends. G. 94 min. One and a half stars out of four.

- Christy Lemire, AP Movie Critic

"REDACTED" - Brian De Palma's outrage over the war in Iraq is palpable in this fictionalized telling of the real-life rape and murder of a teenage girl by U.S. soldiers outside Baghdad. Certainly this is a story that people need to know about. His technique, however, tends to be gimmicky and cliched. The writer-director strays from his typically stylized approach with this stripped-down pastiche of fake footage: a soldier's hand-held video diary, a French duo's sepia-toned documentary, TV news pieces and online video from both a terrorist Web site and the blog of an Army man's wife. His point, of course, is that we're not getting the full story of the war from the mainstream media. But by showing us absolutely everything from myriad perspectives, it feels like De Palma is beating us over the head. Ironically, "Redacted" might have been more compelling if De Palma had redacted himself a bit - if he hadn't been so overt, if he'd given us enough credit to think for ourselves and come to our own conclusions about these men and the choices they made. (The graphic ending - a series of photos of the bloodied bodies of slain Iraqi civilians - serves as a harrowing exclamation point.) That the unknown cast members mostly look stiff and self-conscious, as if they're performing an off-Broadway play on film, contributes to the sensation that we're watching something that's obviously staged and makes it tougher to become truly immersed. R for strong disturbing violent content including a rape, pervasive language and some sexual references/images. 90 min. Two stars out of four.

- Christy Lemire, AP Movie Critic

"SOUTHLAND TALES" - Writer-director Richard Kelly set out to tell a grand comic adventure about an apocalypse close at hand. With boundless ambition far exceeding his ability to tell a coherent story, Kelly managed only an artistic apocalypse. Irksomely self-important, deliberately cryptic and cluttered far beyond the point of chaos, Kelly's second movie may strain the patience even of the cult crowd that embraced his debut, "Donnie Darko," a cinematic riddle that looks positively mainstream next to this fiasco. There are clever moments here and there. But taken as a whole, you're left wondering if the eclectic cast - which includes Sarah Michelle Gellar, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, Seann William Scott, Mandy Moore and Justin Timberlake - had any clue what the story was about. The incomprehensible plot centers on a confluence of weird sci-fi happenings that spell the end of existence over the Fourth of July, 2008. Kelly chopped 19 minutes from the version that disastrously premiered to scornful reviews at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. But the best you can say about the shorter cut is that it's 19 minutes less bad than the Cannes one. R for language, violence, sexual material and some drug content. 144 min. One star out of four.

- David Germain, AP Movie Writer

Nothing here has me excited. But, if I had to choose one -- it would likely "Wonder Emporium." My nephew likes the commercials for this one.

I am looking forward to "Stephen King's The Mist" and "August Rush." Stephen King and Freddie Highmoore are two of my favorites.

- Paul