Blockbustercreated a prompt that asked users what the worst thing they had ever done for money was and then volunteered to go first. Their answer: letting Netflix make the sitcom.
Netflixand Blockbuster have never been on the best of terms, so it was strange to audiences when Netflix announced they’d be doing a workplace sitcom focused on the former rental giant, as they were partially responsible for having killed their business model in the first place. Now, Blockbuster is aiming fortheBlockbusterseriescreated by formerBrooklyn 99writer Vanessa Ramos, which got abysmal ratings.
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On paper, the idea of aBlockbusterseries on Netflix sounded like it should have worked. Starring comedy veterans like99’s Melissa Fumero,Fresh Off the Boat’s Randall Park, andCurb Your Enthusiasm’sJ.B. Smoove, there were all the ingredients for aSuperstore-like series about the wacky antics of the employeesat the last Blockbuster in existence. Then came the actual airing of the show, and somewhere between conception and production, what was made was a mess that critics lambasted—it sits at 45% on Metacritic and its audience score is 4.7. The show crashed and burned harder than when Netflix killed its actual namesake. The dismal reviews prompted the official Blockbuster store Twitter account to post a tweet asking, “What’s the worth thing you’ve done for money? Well, go first,” accompanied by a Forbes article naming theBlockbusterseries the worst-reviewed show on TV right now.
Back when Netflix was still a company that mailed DVDs to a member’s home based on their-then subscription plan model, Blockbuster still rode high as the king of the rental places, having first shut out mom-and-pop rental chains with their much higher supply capacity and then even rivals like Hollywood Video. Sure, others were springing up, Red Box kiosks in retail stores and the like, but the company that had come to own a monopoly on the market never saw it coming when Netflix made the jump to streaming and got left in the dust by what they had viewed as an upstart. The company mostly shut down around 2014 when its last chained-owned stores closed, but thelast official independent Blockbusterlocation in Bend, Oregon is still hanging on.
Now audiences are witnessing an ouroboros—the snake eating its tail—of rivalry between the two companies. Blockbuster dismissed upstart Netflix, who then made a sitcom gloating over its rival’s demise. Now that rival is trash-talking said gloating on Twitter. Businesses gonna business, in other words. It’s just not every day audiences get to witness them beefing in public.
