Blockbuster customers overwhelmingly prefer new releases to older catalog movies. I work in LA, movie capitol of America, right? I remember when we removed the foreign section from our store on Larchmont. The customers, save for a couple, didn't even notice! So, of course, the Blockbuster Total Access catalog is skewed toward new releases, but the actual sizes of the comparative catalogs is pretty close. Especially considering that Blockbuster will ship videos directly out of its stores-- it doesn't do that as much as its warehouse capacity has increased, but for a while many of the stores were shipping out catalog titles at a surprising pace!
The beauty of the Total Access program was that it offered a convenient blend of catalog movies available anytime and new releases since you could exchange your rentals for New Releases in the store. Within the past few months, customers even had the option of having movies rented in the store automatically removed from their queues. The real problem with that is that our No Late Fees policy absolutely decimated the in-store supply of New Releases! No one brings them back!
It really saddens me that Blockbuster is deemphasizing Total Access. It was one of the few areas where I could, for a while anyway, say "See? This is something Blockbuster got right!"
