It’s been a blockbuster year for this Brooklyn shop!
Night Owl Video, the Big Apple’s sole remaining video store, is ringing in its first year in business this weekend – and is already considering expanding thanks to an overwhelming appetite for physical copies in the streaming era.
Co-owner Aaron Hamel told The Post his Brooklyn shop — which slings hundreds of movies on VHS and DVDs each week — is now looking to stock up on more material to keep up with growing demand, including from a soaring cohort of Gen-Z film fans.
“We have heaps of regulars, and we have a lot of Gen-Z customers,” co-owner Jess Mills added, noting popular requests include the 2025 Oscar-winning drama “Sinners” and David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks” series and 1997 film “Lost Highway.”
“Right now, we’re trying to even further optimize the space, put more stuff into it — but if things keep progressing the way that they are, there could be a bigger space in the future,” Hamel said from his 800-square-foot, ’80s nostalgia-tinged shop.
Night Owl, which touts the slogan “death to streamers/physical media forever!” will be kicking off its one-year anniversary fête on Saturday, complete with a weekend-long sale, afterparty and commemorative goodies — including a VHS “mixtape” cobbled by Hamel himself.
The celebratory crowd is expected to be as diverse as the shop’s customer base — which also spans local Gen-Xers and millennials, as well as out-of-towners and even overseas collectors, Mills said.
Since opening last April, the shop has added multiple shelves of product and expanded its operating hours to seven days a week to feed a steady influx of movie-lovers.
The duo even hired a new employee last month to run the shop while Hamel spelunks for more oddities.
Hamel predicted one recent acquisition — 300 New York City skateboarding tapes dating back to the ’80s purchased from a seller upstate — will spark a “feeding frenzy” once they hit the retail floor.
“Every section has grown,” said Mills, including trading cards and other film ephemera, “but the DVDs and VHS [tapes] — their popularity has been amazing to see.”
“A lot of people have dug out their VHS player” after visiting the quirky shop, Mills said — although she and Hamel said they knew well before opening that there was an untapped demand for an old-school video store in the Big Apple.
“One of the reasons we opened here is because there wasn’t something dedicated to film New York anymore,” said Mills.
“A lot of [stores] had shut down. So we know there was an audience for it — but what surprised us is it was much bigger than what we expected.”
The shop owners recall hearing “every day” from customers fed up with the cost of subscriptions for streamers, lack of options when movies are pulled from a service, or “both.”
“A younger generation — that certainly we’ve found here — has spent their entire lives in a digital world that’s just gotten worse with time, so I think it definitely makes sense to see that demographic being drawn to physical media,” Hamel said.
“My favorite thing that a younger person said … is, VHS is just something that works: there’s no menu, there’s no ads, there’s no anything,” he recalled.
“You just put it in, and it’s playing a movie.”
Other recent favorites include 1988’s “Surviving Edged Weapons” — the “’Citizen Kane’ of police training videos,” Hamel said – which he recently screened at documentary filmmaker John Wilson’s micro-moviehouse in Ridgewood, Queens.
Many of the store’s roughly 12,000 titles — sold on average for between $10 and $20 — are bought by Hamel directly from sellers online or in-person, but customers also regularly trade in their VHS, laser discs and even Betamax tapes that are otherwise collecting dust.
Mills said the trade-in program has yielded both offbeat surprises and bucket-list items.
“That happens a lot — where we really hope we get this thing in, and we pray long enough,” she said.
“I’ve been wanting to see “Napoleon Dynamite” on VHS, and it took us almost the entire year to finally come across one.”
