A Portland rental shop that became Hollywood Entertainment.

Hollywood Video was the trading name of Hollywood Entertainment Corp., a video-rental chain from Oregon founded by Mark Wattles. English Wikipedia says Wattles, whose parents had given him and his wife a VCR, opened a small rental shop called Home Theater in downtown Portland in 1985 and formed Hollywood Entertainment in 1988, serving as its president and chief executive. Oregon Business, in an April 2010 article, dated the Home Theater store, on SE Powell Boulevard in Portland, to 1988, and the change of its name to Hollywood Video to the following year.

The company grew out of the Pacific Northwest. Stores opened in Washington, California, Nevada and Texas, English Wikipedia says, citing a 1994 Associated Press report, and Hollywood Entertainment became a public company in 1993, a year Oregon Business also gives. In January 1995 Blockbuster sued Hollywood Entertainment over its hiring of former Blockbuster employees, and in May 1995 a judge ruled in Hollywood’s favour, Wikipedia says, citing the Salem Statesman Journal. By mid-1995, Wikipedia says, the company also ran stores under the Video Park and Video Central names, and that August it bought the Midwestern chain Video Watch. In 1996 it set up regional offices in the Chicago, Houston and San Francisco Bay areas, citing the Portland Business Journal. Its stores often stood in the same mostly urban retail centres as Blockbuster’s, Oregon Business wrote.

In July 1998 Hollywood Entertainment agreed to buy Reel.com, an internet video seller based in Berkeley, California, CBS MarketWatch reported on 31 July 1998; Wikipedia says Reel.com was to keep operating independently under its chief executive, Julie Wainwright. The company later added a video-game chain, GameCrazy. Its headquarters moved from Beaverton to Wilsonville, south of Portland, in the 1990s, English Wikipedia says.

A mountain scene, a blue band and raised letters.

A detailed contemporary description of the Hollywood Video identity comes from a dispute over a sign. In August 1997, the Portland Business Journal reported, the company was planning a new corporate headquarters at the Wilsonville Business Park, and one of the city’s development review boards had approved the offices but would not support every part of what the company called its “signature sign.”

That sign, as the paper described it, combined a mountain scene, the company name in raised aluminium letters on a blue background, and a blue neon band bordering the mountains. The board, which reviewed architecture and landscaping, ruled that the neon band be dropped, saying neon was out of character for the business park. The proposal had already been scaled back since its original review, the paper said, with the letters reduced from 60 inches to 48. Company officials said the sign reflected their culture and helped create an innovative working environment.

Wattles objected in plain terms. “There’s a good chance that we will move our world headquarters out of Wilsonville over their silly opinion on what they think our signs should look like,” he told the Portland Business Journal that month, adding: “I’ve built this whole company based on that corporate logo.” The company did stay in Wilsonville. English Wikipedia says it leased the former Thrifty Payless headquarters building there after Trammell Crow bought that site in January 1999, citing the Portland Business Journal, and that it remained headquartered in the town.

The name itself reached for the film business, as Blockbuster’s did. In a May 2014 comment on Fonts In Use, beneath an entry on the Blockbuster identity, Stephen Coles wrote that Hollywood Video’s logo used lettering similar to Blockbuster’s; Lee Dean, who says he designed the Blockbuster logo, replied there that the Hollywood sign had nothing to do with his own choice of font.

Design and documentation.

A music, video or electronics shop carried its name on far more than the sign over the door. The same mark turned up on the fascia above a mall entrance, on the plastic rental case handed across the counter, on the paper or plastic bag a customer carried home, on a membership card and on the small price sticker pressed onto a cassette, compact disc or box.

Each of those surfaces asked something different of a logo. A store sign had to read from across a car park or a shopping concourse; a rental case had to survive being opened and returned many times; a bag had to look right when folded, creased and printed in one or two flat colours; a price sticker had to carry a name at the size of a fingernail. Colours that worked on an illuminated sign did not always survive cheap printing, so many retail marks leaned on a few strong, flat tones and simple letterforms.

Each guide in this group sets out who started the store, who has owned the name since, and what became of it, and it marks plainly what rests only on a company’s own word. The palettes and type are our interpretation, not reproductions.

Movie Gallery, closure and a domain that lives on.

Blockbuster later tried to buy its rival. The New York Times reported in March 2005 that Blockbuster and Movie Gallery, based in Dothan, Alabama, had been bidding for Hollywood Entertainment since November 2004, and that Blockbuster had dropped its offer, citing the likelihood that the Federal Trade Commission would reject the deal on antitrust grounds. Movie Gallery, founded in Dothan in 1985 by Joe Malugen and Harrison Parrish, according to Oregon Business, said on 28 April 2005 that it had completed the acquisition, the Portland Business Journal reported, and Hollywood would operate as a subsidiary under its own name from its Wilsonville headquarters. Movie Gallery moved its own headquarters to Wilsonville in 2009, Oregon Business wrote.

Movie Gallery, which had filed for bankruptcy in February 2010 for the second time in just over two years, planned to shut its remaining US stores, The Wall Street Journal reported on 3 May 2010. English Wikipedia gives 31 July 2010 as the closing date of the last Hollywood Video store in the United States and 8 August 2010 for Canada. In April 2010, Oregon Business quoted Thomas Arnold, publisher of the trade weekly Home Media Magazine: “There’s an old saying: change or die. And Movie Gallery hasn’t changed.”

The name lives on as a website. In December 2011, English Wikipedia says, hollywoodvideo.com was relaunched as a movie-news site; in October 2026 it described itself as “The NEW Hollywood Video – An Entertainment News Curator” and carried posts dated September 2026.

For a design guide, Hollywood Video shows how a chain can put its identity into a single sign — a mountain scene, a blue band and raised letters — and how firmly a founder can defend it. Compare Blockbuster, the rival that sued it in 1995 and bid for it in 2004, and Netflix, another name from home video. For this guide we use marquee blue, raised aluminium and ink with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Hollywood Video’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.