blockbuster

In the winter of 1942, RAF crews over Germany were dropping 4,000-pound bombs they called blockbusters because a single one could flatten an entire city block. The compound was American English by structure: block came from Middle Dutch blok, a log or solid mass that English had extended to mean a row of connected buildings. Buster was a colloquial agent noun from bust, a dialectal variant of burst. Put together, the word named something large enough to break a whole block at once, which those bombs were.

The bomb sense circulated through wartime journalism and faded as the war ended. In the late 1940s, real estate agents in Chicago and other northern cities began using blockbusting to describe a different kind of destruction. The tactic was to move one Black family into a white neighborhood, trigger panic selling, then buy the remaining homes cheaply. Federal investigations documented the practice across dozens of cities through the 1950s, and the word now named a form of racial coercion that accelerated residential segregation across the country.

The entertainment industry reclaimed the word in 1975 when Jaws earned over $100 million at the American box office that summer, shattering studio expectations about what a film could earn. Variety and the Hollywood trade press reached for blockbuster to describe a film that overwhelmed the market. Jaws was the first major film to open wide simultaneously in hundreds of theaters rather than rolling out city by city. Producers began deliberately engineering blockbuster releases, and the word became a genre designation as much as a size descriptor.

Blockbuster Video, founded in 1985 in Dallas by David Cook, borrowed the word at the height of home video. By 2004 the chain had 9,000 stores worldwide and 60,000 employees. By 2010 it was bankrupt, undone by streaming services it had declined to acquire. The word outlasted the company and still means a film or product with overwhelming commercial impact, the ghost of a wartime bomb now haunting summer opening weekends.