This movie lover wants to bring back a video rental store to Minneapolis

A trip to the video store was once a weekly ritual, and now one Minnesota movie lover is trying to bring that experience back.

For Eric Knobel, it started with a store across the street from his elementary school.

"I'd walk through and I'd just spend hours just looking at the boxes," he said. "I don't ever remember actually renting anything from that video store, but I remember looking at the boxes for hours and hours."

Those childhood visits eventually turned into jobs at both Blockbuster and mom-and-pop stores. But as streaming took over, the stores disappeared and so did the titles.

"It kind of went from claiming they were gonna have everything and be a sort of like haven for filmmakers to maybe 'we're not gonna release that in theaters' to now 'we're gonna release it on disc,'" said Knobel.

Knobel says there's also an intangible loss.

"It was unfortunate to lose the sort of communal aspects of a video store," he said.

Now he's working to bring some of that back with an ambitious project: The Video Store MPLS, a nonprofit rental shop built around preserving physical media.

"Good or bad, have these titles available for people, if they hear about a movie or a television series, they should be able to go somewhere and check it out," he said.

The collection already numbers over 3,000 titles, and donations keep arriving.

The goal is eventually tens of thousands of movies, available at a brick-and-mortar store.

A 30-day fundraiser starting Aug. 1 kicks off with a showing at Trylon Cinema.

"How well that fundraiser does will kind of give us the answer to what kind of space we can get," Knobel said.

It's a place where movies aren't curated by algorithms, or removed without notice. They're just waiting on a shelf for the next person to discover them.