Despite the discontinuation of Redbox, the DVD rental machine company, officially, the company’s distribution kiosks are still spread throughout America. The machines are still operational and there are still hundreds of digital video discs (DVDs) inside them. Recently, these machines have been sold to many hardware enthusiasts who have in turn reverse engineered them to understand how they work and distribute the movies trapped inside. Well, except for one: The Hurricane.
Reports from 404 Media suggest that, for a strange reason, the eager hardware enthusiasts who were manipulating the company’s machines cannot figure out how to extract a disaster from 1996. To shed light on this strange puzzle, 404 cites a series of Reddit threads and Discord communities where hardware pros discuss this issue. “Sorry, there was an issue with the items in your cart. Please remove these items from your cart to continue,” reads a warning from the kiosk, whenever someone tries to rent The Hurricane. The director wrote that this issue affects “apparently every Redbox kiosk and does not happen with any other movie.”
404 Media writes that the machine’s refusal to dispense The Hurricane “seems to be either a licensing dispute or a programming error.” The outlet also mentions that one prevailing theory is that “Redbox’s license agreement for The Hurricane expired before the release of its sequel, The Hurricanes, and there is a specific checkout date for The Hurricane in your shopping cart that got disabled.” However, 404 notes that no one has been able to confirm this.
Redbox dominated the video rental scene in the early 2000s, shortly before the demise of the traditional mom and pop store model in the industry due to the rise of Netflix and streaming video. The company was originally a subsidiary of McDonald’s, then the company expanded strongly in the years following its founding. At one point, Redbox surpassed Blockbuster as the largest video rental retailer in the country. Now, of course, all of that is over, thanks to the dominance of streaming.
Two years ago, a subsidiary of the company that publishes the self-help book series Chicken Soup for the Soul purchased Redbox. Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment acquired debts of $325 million when it acquired the company, with a plan to reinvent the struggling business. Instead, the company accumulated huge amounts of debt and had to file for bankruptcy in August of last year. As part of the bankruptcy deal, it was necessary to liquidate Redbox. Reports from The Verge indicate that when Chicken Soup filed for bankruptcy this summer, it was sued “more than a dozen times for unpaid bills.”
