Pete Davidson may be a well-established comedian and actor, but as he revealed on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on Tuesday, he’s got a potentially lucrative plan B in the works as well — and it’s a little bit nostalgic, too.
Davidson was on the show to promote his SNL hosting gig this Saturday, which was rescheduled from right before the writers’ strike began. But before Davidson could go down that road, Fallon just had to ask him about his somewhat odd collection.
It turns out that about three years ago, Davidson began collecting sealed VHS tapes, stemming from an instance when he was “really high one night,” and he began buying them up. But he does have a somewhat valid reason behind it.
“In 2026 it’ll be 20 years since the last VHS was made, right, so 20 years goes by, that’s enough time for people to be like, ‘Oh, that was cool, remember?’ like vinyl. So I bought all the sealed ones that exist. Like three to five thousand tapes.”
The crowd chuckled when Davidson mentioned his amount of tapes, so he said, “You guys sound like my mom, no one believes in me. No one believes in me!”
After Fallon showed some pictures of many, many packages arriving at Davidson’s assistant’s house (much to the chagrin of his assistant’s girlfriend), Davidson expanded on his plan, mentioning that sealed VHS tapes are now going for like $20,000 to $30,000 a pop.
He pointed to a recent sale of an original Rocky trilogy in sealed VHS tape form that went for a combined $53,750 at auction, with Rocky leading the way by pulling in $27,500.
“It’s my GameStop,” Davidson said excitedly. “Dude, I own all of them. No one believed in me.”
Although with any big investment there are some risks, in this case one being that only a select few of those 3,000-5,000 titles will actually be worth any money. If that does happen, Davidson has a much less enthusiastic plan C as well.
“If it doesn’t work, I’m gonna be on the road forever dude,” he said.
The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon airs weeknights at 11:35 p.m. on NBC.
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