Video King is closing its doors for good after 40 years

Full's father owned his own business and Full knew that he would follow the same path.

Now, after several decades, Full knows his business by heart and is fully familiar with its numbers and statistics. He can tell you when the first Blockbuster movie rental store opened in Winnipeg, how many copies of E.T. "Alien" sold at the time of release and how many movies were released last year.

But early next month, Full will press the stop button on Video King for good.

"This is our fortieth year, so it's both bitter and sweet," Full said in an interview. We had prosperous days. "It's just sad to say that this is the end of our boom days."

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Video King opened in Winnipeg's Transcona neighborhood in the mid-1980s, when the movie rental industry was expanding across Canada.

For years, this small, family-run shop has provided a place for families and movie buffs to browse the shelves to find their perfect Friday night movie.

Even when movie rental chains like Blockbuster and Rogers Video closed their doors in the mid-2000s due to the rise of streaming services and the digital movie revolution, Video King was able to bring customers back to the store with the expertise of its employees and its movie collection.

With the arrival of movie streaming services, the store faced its own problems, but after a tumultuous few years during the Covid-19 pandemic and a months-long Hollywood strike between the actors' and writers' unions and the studios, Full saw signs of the end.

"Hollywood went on strike and that was the final blow," he said. "We spent many months without a film."

"Now, the strike is over, but it's too late. People never come back. "The masses are not coming back to support the business."

Full previously imported an average of 36 new movie titles per month. He says that he had 14 titles in total last year.

"It was just as bad with the strikes," he said.

This businessman and a member of the city council in the municipality of Springfield entered this business in 1988. The business also includes distribution of films to other retailers such as convenience stores across the province.

At one point, Fulle said, he served more than 400 vendors in rural Manitoba, Saskatchewan and northwestern Ontario that lack reliable high-speed Internet.

Leila Dance, of the area's business district, remembers visiting some of these places as a child as a way to pass the time on a rainy night by the lake.

"I didn't realize we were renting movies from Video King until I started working for Transcona Biz four years ago," said Dance, CEO of Transcona Biz. "I didn't know that the videos we were taking from this store by the lake were from him."

"It was a funny moment."

Customer Bud Smith estimates that more than half of the thousands of videos he owns are from Video King.

"[Fool] always had B-movies, classics, blockbusters," Smith said in an interview. "I could always make a variety of films, but he always seemed to have the odd or rare film."

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