One of the last Blockbuster Video stores in Los Angeles will be closing in mid-April. The Blockbuster Video on La Brea, just north of Wilshire, will close in mid-April.
Early last year, Blockbuster Video, once one of the biggest brand names in the U.S., announced it would be closing more than 500 stores as their leases came up. And while this store closure was inevitable due to the changing Blockbuster business model, there’s a force bigger than digital movie delivery over the internet bearing down on this particular location.
The Westside Subway Extension of the Metro Purple Line will be barreling down Wilshire in the next several years and this corner, owned by Metro since the 1980s, will eventually be the location of the Wilshire-La Brea metro station. The buildings, including the Metro Customer Service Center and the Blockbuster, will be razed and the corner will initially be used as a staging area for Metro construction and as a launch site for the tunnel boring machines.
Metro construction on the extension between Western and La Cienega is slated to begin in 2014. And so the end for this particular Blockbuster Video can be considered dignified – call it a closing in the name of progress.
Presumed all the Blockbusters had closed since the one on Larchmont’s been closed for years.
Soon…they’re now owned by Dish Network and they are re-branding as Blockbuster Entertainment on Dish.