Did you know that twenty years ago – actually, it’ll be 21
years next month – Blockbuster had the chance to buy Netflix for $50 million?
At the time, Blockbuster was the biggest kid on the playground, and Netflix was this little DVD-by-mail rental service. If you wanted to watch
something, you’d let them know, and the postman would drop it in your mailbox. Eventually.
The idea just wasn’t catching on as fast as Netflix had hoped, and they were
bleeding red ink. Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings, who’d founded Netflix three
years earlier, believed combining forces with Blockbuster would benefit both companies.
But John Antioco, the CEO of Blockbuster, thought the idea was laughable. He
turned them down. Last year, the revenue for Netflix was $25 billion. Blockbuster
died in 2010. If it wasn’t for the 2019 movie, Captain Marvel, none of my
students would have ever heard of it.
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