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Notes -
In 1999? 2000? Absolutely huge. Things were gearing up for the DVD transition, Disney was getting ready to do their old hat trick where they "take the classics out of the vault," basically every American home had shelves and shelves of tapes or disks, probably in an entertainment center.
It's definitely true that people had to be more selective in movie watching than they do now. But if you didn't have a copy of a movie you wanted to see, you went to Blockbuster and you rented it. Going to Blockbuster on Friday evening to rent a movie was a big tradition.
I do feel like a movie release was a big deal in the late 90s/2000s. Movie tie-ins were everywhere, movies would get websites where you could see trailers or character profiles, children's movies often had websites with games and movie-tie in games were widespread. A movie felt like an event that had ripple effects. I still remember when I was fairly young and Monsters, Inc. came out -- they had a huge website and a hunt-and-seek game where you would walk through the whole scare factory. That was cool enough that it cemented Monsters Inc as one of my favorite Pixar movies even all these years later.
The only times in the past 10 years where movies have felt like that are when The Force Awakens came out, and when Avengers: Endgame came out. But neither have really lasted in the public consciousness the way movies seemed to in the past. It feels a lot like the "extras" that companies used to put in for lots of products have fallen by the wayside. And websites are way less cool than they used to be.
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