By Joel Crabtree
Photos by
From our September 2025 issue
Greg Bates was thinking he should catch up on some Oscar-nominated movies from earlier this year. He did not, however, reach for the TV remote and scroll for Netflix or Prime Video. Instead, he hopped in his car and headed to Opera House Video, the 30-year-old rental shop in downtown Belfast. Owner Denis Howard was there at the counter, at the back of the shop, past the canyons of shelves neatly jammed with DVDs, as well as some Blu-ray discs and VHS tapes. Bates inquired about the screen adaptation of the Broadway musical Wicked.
“That, as you may have guessed, has been popular,” Howard said, tapping away at his laptop keyboard to check whether Wicked might be in stock. All the copies were out, so Bates turned to Conclave, the drama centering around the election of a new pope. He wondered if his partner would like it, because she doesn’t watch anything frightening enough to keep her up at night, a fact Howard already knew. “I thought it would be more of a thriller — I was thinking Da Vinci Code or something,” Howard said. “It’s a smart movie. The acting is incredible.” He mentioned that there’s a twist that caught him entirely unawares, and he praised the supporting role John Lithgow played. They chatted a bit more. You can’t have a conversation, Bates observed aloud, with a streaming app.
Just a couple of decades ago, video-rental shops were a fairly unremarkable sight, with some 25,000 of them spread across the country. Mom-and-pop establishments faced pressure from Blockbuster and other chains (and the tens of thousands of grocery stores and other retailers that offered their own video rentals or had Redbox kiosks), but the underlying model seemed sound enough. Then, in 2007, Netflix started transitioning from rent by mail to streaming, and the whole business changed. Now, the national chains are gone, and only a few hundred independent shops remain.
In Maine, as elsewhere, the dominoes fell fast. A couple of cinephilic pillars, Portland’s Videoport and Brunswick’s Bart & Greg’s DVD Explosion, hung on until 2015 and 2017 respectively. Rangeley’s Video Habits called it quits several years later. Opera House Video is the last holdout (a few other retailers, like Hope General Store, rent movies, but it’s a small side business). Howard says there’s no great mystery behind Opera House Video’s survival: it has a committed customer base in and around Belfast. It also, though, has a committed owner, who maintains the same prices — four dollars for two nights, or three nights if rented on a Saturday — as when the shop opened.
Doug Robertson and Karolina Weinberger started Opera House Video in 1995, but after a decade, both died unexpectedly. They willed the store to Howard’s sister, Tiffany, and her partner, Jim Dandy, both of whom had been employees. Howard, a longtime customer, began putting in a few hours here and there at the shop in 2009. To that point, he had worked in various roles at Belfast’s old Colonial movie theater, WERU Community Radio, and Maine Public, plus had done some wedding DJing (he’s currently WERU’s music director and business-support manager). In 2018, when Tiffany and Jim were thinking about getting out of the video-rental business, he bought it. “One of my earliest memories was my father taking me to the Colonial, back when it was one screen and maybe 300 seats,” Howard says. “Movies have played such a key role in my entertainment, my decompression from whatever life is, and now even my employment.”
Opera House Video takes its name from the 1865 red-brick building where it occupies a ground-floor space — an opera house fills much of the upper floors, and though it has been closed for several decades, an effort to renovate it is underway. The wooden floors in Howard’s shop are well-worn. The old register is only equipped to handle cash or check, and Howard lets some regulars run a tab. There’s a gumball machine, plus some boxes of Raisinets and other classic movie snacks. The long, tall shelves are organized around genres and themes — action, foreign films, war, westerns, science fiction — and there are also staff picks and rotating mini-displays, like one dedicated to movies featuring the recently departed Gene Hackman. Not sure whether Das Boot belongs in war or foreign films or whether Cowboys & Aliens is more science fiction or western? Howard can quickly point you in the right direction. If you pay a few visits, he’ll also be able to make suggestions based not on an impersonal algorithm but on his understanding of personal tastes.
“Amazon and Netflix are the most sophisticated delivery systems available, but Denis beats them,” Bates said, still weighing his Oscar-nominated options. “He knows exactly what I like and exactly what my partner likes and the differences between us. He can just pick something out, and say, ‘Hey, you should watch this.’”
Also, Bates prefers to keep his money local. “It would irk me to pay Jeff Bezos four bucks for anything,” he said, but he’d gladly pay Opera House Video more per rental. “Paying Denis for this feels like I’m being treated fairly.He doesn’t have a membership fee. I don’t pay a hundred bucks a year for the privilege of just walking in here. I pay four bucks.”
Howard has also developed a pretty good sense for how quickly certain customers will return their rentals. In the case of Wicked, he told Bates he had a hunch one of those copies would show up later in the day. “I might be back for it,” Bates said, leaving with a Conclave DVD already in hand. It would be due back on Tuesday.
