The Last Blockbuster

The blue-and-yellow sign hangs over a strip-mall storefront at 211 NE Revere Avenue in Bend, where U.S. Route 20 meets Revere, just off Third Street. A Source Weekly writer in 2018 placed it in “an unassuming building next to a take and bake pizza joint.” Inside are aisles of Blu-rays and DVDs, candy, and souvenirs. Visit Central Oregon wrote in 2024 that the store looks just as it might have in the early 2000s. On display are the hood Russell Crowe wore in Robin Hood, the robe and shorts from Cinderella Man, his vest from Les Misérables, and director’s chairs for Crowe and Denzel Washington from American Gangster.

This is the last Blockbuster on Earth. It is an independently owned franchise. Ken Tisher, who owns it, licenses the trademark from Dish Network year by year, and Dish no longer grants new franchises under the name. Sandi Harding has been general manager since 2004.

Discs from Walmart, shirts from Bend

Renting still works the old way. A visitor with a credit or debit card and a government-issued ID can take Blu-rays and DVDs back to a hotel room, if the room has a player. Counts of the stock vary by source. The store’s own site advertises more than 21,000 movies. A 2016 Bulletin story put the catalog at 14,000 titles, about 1,000 of them for children. Wikipedia gives around 1,200 titles and an estimated 4,000 members who rent regularly. The site’s New Releases page was last updated July 14, 2026.

Those new releases do not come from a distributor. Most of the DVD vendors that once supplied the store have closed, and the rest require minimum orders too large for a single shop. Harding buys new titles at the local Walmart or Target and the candy at Costco. In 2016 she was already doing the same for Disney films, which Disney would not let Blockbuster order directly.

Many visitors come only for the souvenirs: T-shirts, stickers, magnets, key chains, coffee mugs, laminated membership cards, hoodies, socks, a coin bank, a board game, an adult onesie. By the store’s account most of it is made in Bend, and the proceeds go to keeping the doors open. In 2024 about 80 percent of the store’s income was estimated to come from merchandise. Much of it carries the old phrase “Be Kind, Rewind.”

A Wednesday in the family section

Before the tourists there were the regulars. On a Wednesday in May 2016, a Bulletin reporter followed Nathanael and Laura Cain and their daughters, Kaidyn, 5, and Jordyn, 4, through the glass doors to the family section. They passed a buttered-popcorn painted wall. Laura carried their 12-week-old son, Cyrus, asleep in her arms. Jordyn pulled “Fun Factory with Goofy” off a low shelf, then drifted toward Frozen, which she had already seen. She settled on an Elmo video, and Kaidyn chose Dolphin Tale 2. When a piece of candy rolled out of a vending machine across the carpet, their father reminded them that “ground candy is not edible.”

The Cains had met working in a video store in Eureka, California, while they were students at Humboldt State. In Bend they paid $30 a month for a movie pass and phoned the staff to hold titles. “They know us by voice,” Laura said. Harding counted about 300 regulars who came in several times a week.

The clerk that day was Xavier Bowles, 19, who rode a longboard to work and wore a navy Blockbuster polo. “I thought it would be a cool idea to go back in time,” he said. “It’s literally what every customer says when they come in here.” He also fielded questions like “Do you know the movie with the guy who was in a different one with a lot of sand?” Harding had worked in retail before, and she compared the two jobs: “It was fun to help people to pick out a prom dress, but movies are things that everyone loves.”

Pacific Video, 1990

The store’s own history begins with Ken and Debbie Tisher, who moved to Bend in September 1990 with their teenagers, Marc and Rory. That December, by the store’s account, they opened the first Pacific Video on the south end of Bend. It rented new titles and classics on VHS as a cheaper night out than the theater. In a 1991 Bulletin interview cited by Wikipedia, Tisher described the approach as a “mom-and-pop store.” Other sources place that first shop differently. A 2015 Bulletin story puts it on SE Division Street, and the Oregon Encyclopedia puts it on Southeast Division Street in Portland. In 1992 the Tishers opened their second store, in leased space at 211 NE Revere.

Blockbuster and Hollywood Video reached Central Oregon in the late 1990s. In June 2000 the Tishers and their partners, Debbie’s parents Larry and Berniece Doan, made Pacific Video a Blockbuster franchise. “Same people, same store, but we changed the signage and there were a lot of unhappy people in Bend,” Tisher told the Bulletin in 2015.

Business held until the 2008 downturn. Tisher closed his store on SW Century Drive in 2010, opened one in Madras, and kept going. Blockbuster’s corporate side filed for bankruptcy in 2010, though the Oregon Encyclopedia dates the proceedings to 2011. In April 2011 Dish Network bought the chain for $320 million. In November 2013 Dish decided to close all corporate stores and convert franchisees to licensees, and the last corporate store closed in January 2014. “Blockbuster, if it isn’t already, is going to go into the Harvard Business Review for how not to run a business,” Tisher said in 2015. The east-side store closed that May, leaving Revere as the last Blockbuster in Bend, with a Redmond store also under Harding.

Last in the country, then last on Earth

In July 2018 the stores in Anchorage and Fairbanks, Alaska, closed, and Bend was the last Blockbuster in the United States. The Oregon Encyclopedia gives the month as August. According to the AP, the Alaska stores barely outlasted the one in Redmond. Tourists began arriving to photograph themselves out front. A Bulletin photo from that July shows an Uber driver, Angelo Bifano, taking his passengers’ picture.

The Alaska closures also sent the Crowe collection south. In April 2018 John Oliver had bought the pieces from the actor for a segment of Last Week Tonight and given them to the Anchorage store to draw attention to it. The collection reached Bend missing one item, a leather jockstrap from Cinderella Man. “No one seems to know where it is,” Harding said that September. By the Bulletin’s account the next March, Oliver had kept it and used it in a skit with Crowe in November.

On a Monday in March 2019, an Australian radio station called Harding with news that the Blockbuster in Perth, the only other one left, would close at the end of the month. “I had no idea,” she said. “I wondered which one of us was going to hold out the longest.” The store was then opening about ten new accounts a day. Zeke Kamm, a Bend filmmaker already at work on a film about the place, said, “There is no winner being the last.”

A documentary, a dark ale, a night in the aisles

Kamm and Taylor Morden began filming in 2017, when about a dozen Blockbusters remained. “The smell in the store really took me back,” Morden said. Kamm once brought his 9-year-old son into the store. The boy picked up a case, turned it over, and said, “There’s stuff on the back.” A Kickstarter campaign launched Aug. 1, 2018, raised $39,078 from 595 donors. The Last Blockbuster follows Harding through her days running the store and includes interviews with Kevin Smith and others. It appeared on Netflix on March 15, 2021, and rose as high as the No. 4 movie in the United States. People sent flowers and called to thank the store for staying open, and staff packed thousands of online orders in the back room.

Other tributes came along the way. The 10 Barrel brewery released a dark ale called The Last Blockbuster, with hints of red licorice, at a block party on Sept. 21, 2018. The Ellen DeGeneres Show filmed a hidden-camera prank there in May 2019. The store kept its staff through the COVID-19 pandemic. On Sept. 18, 19 and 20, 2020, it rented its floor through Airbnb to Deschutes County households for $4 a night. Guests got popcorn, pizza, a pop-up living room in one corner, and use of the employee bathroom. Family Guy built an episode around the store, and Netflix made a sitcom based on a fictional version of it.

In February 2023, during the Super Bowl halftime show, the store ran an ad on Instagram. In it a lone cockroach crosses the aftermath of an apparent global catastrophe and arrives at the last Blockbuster, which is still open.