Movie rentals are a dying segment. Blockbuster has been down to one single location in the whole world since 2020, and Netflix killed off its DVD rental service, which it offered since 1997, just last year. Redbox was still around and you could still grab movies from kiosks, but now, Redbox is also going away.
Redbox is now in the process of shutting down. Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment, Redbox’s parent company, initially filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy a little over a week ago, but now, the jury has allowed a request to convert that to Chapter 7 bankruptcy. That means that the company is now due to shut down and its assets are due to be liquidated. This means that, for all intents and purposes, Redbox is dead as a dodo.
It’s not clear yet what will happen to Redbox’s library of movies, and if we can expect any flash sales. When the company discontinued game rentals in 2019, the remaining inventory was sold off a a discount. However, we don’t know if that will happen again with the movies.
The truth is that with the age of streaming, demand for movie rentals has kept dwindling. In the case of Netflix, it successfully converted to one of the world’s biggest streaming services before it actually killed off its rental service. Blockbuster as a physical chain of retail stores is long gone, and the one location that still stands today in Bend, Oregon has stayed afloat on virtue of it being basically a tourist attraction rather than because of people legitimately going in to rent movies. Redbox attempted to capitalize on Netflix’s removal of rentals by offering affected users free rentals, and it’s sad to see that it didn’t even last a full year from that moment.
We’ll certainly miss it, but at the same time, streaming is probably the future.
Source: Lowpass
