San Antonio's only free movie-swap shop has a new address and a reopening date: November 21 at The Shops at Bandera Road, 1331 Bandera Road. Free Blockbuster San Antonio is leaving its original spot at My Weekend World Events Center on McCarty Road, where it first opened in August 2025, according to the San Antonio Express-News.
The shop will set up near Retroz, the other business run by Kevin Clary, in Suite 189, according to an earlier report from MySA. That October report said Clary expected the new location to launch by the end of 2026 but did not yet have an exact date, and it noted the McCarty Road setup had been in place for roughly a year before the planned move. The Bandera Road spot will keep offering free Blu-ray, 4K, DVD and VHS titles across genres, per the Express-News.
How the Take-a-Movie, Leave-a-Movie System Works
The shop operates on a simple take-a-video-leave-a-video model: to pick a film off a rack, a visitor has to leave one behind for the next person, the same account from MySA explains. There's no charge and no return due date, so the collection just keeps turning over as neighbors trade titles back and forth. Ahead of the move, staff at Retroz were accepting donations of VHS tapes, DVDs and Blu-rays to help stock the new shelves, the outlet reported.
Free Blockbuster San Antonio has joined the broader national Free Blockbuster movement, which began in 2018 when a former Blockbuster employee and VHS collector in California started painting over abandoned Los Angeles Times newspaper dispensers and filling them with DVDs, according to the Express-News. The group has described the project's mission, in comments posted to Instagram, as sharing movies, keeping physical media alive, and making movies accessible to everyone. A 2024 New York Times report found the movement had grown to more than 200 community boxes stretching from Louisiana to Canada and even Britain, though it was unclear at the time how many were still operating.
A Local Tribute to a Fallen Giant
San Antonio's shop is a small community echo of a company that once dominated American living rooms. Blockbuster launched as a home-video rental chain in Dallas in 1985 and exploded in popularity through the 1990s, growing to roughly 9,000 stores worldwide at its peak in 2004. The chain's decline came fast in the late 2000s, as the Great Recession collided with competition from a then-nascent mail-order and streaming service called Netflix.
Free Blockbuster San Antonio is, by the Express-News's account, the city's first swap shop built in that spirit, offering a free, no-deadline alternative to the rental model that defined a generation before streaming took over.
