Nobody Can Rent Twister, the Last DVD Trapped in Redbox’s Dead Video Business

Though Redbox, the DVD vending machine company, is officially dead, the company’s disc-dispensing kiosks are still strewn all over America. The machines still work and there are still hundreds of DVDs inside of them. Lately, those machines have been getting sold off to various hardware enthusiasts who have, in turn, been reverse-engineering them to figure out how they work, and to dispense the movies trapped inside. Well, with one exception: Twister.

404 Media reports that, for some weird reason, the army of amateur hardware enthusiasts who have been futzing with the company’s machines cannot figure out how to get the 1996 disaster flick out of them. To illuminate this bizarre conundrum, 404 cites a series of Reddit threads and Discord communities where the hardware pros have been posting about the issue. “Sorry, there was a problem with the purchased items in your cart. Please remove these items from your cart in order to continue,” an alert from the kiosk reads, whenever someone tries to rent Twister. This issue impacts “seemingly every Redbox kiosk and is not happening with any other movie,” the outlet writes.

404 Media writes that the machine’s refusal to dispense Twister “appears to be either a licensing dispute or software bug.” The outlet further states that one of the prevailing theories is that “Redbox’s licensing agreement for Twister ran out ahead of the release of its sequel, Twisters, and there is a hard-coded date where checking out with Twister in your cart was disabled.” That said, 404 notes nobody has been able to confirm this.

Redbox swept onto the video rental scene in the early aughts, not long before the industry’s mom-and-pop store paradigm would be disrupted by the advent of Netflix and video streaming. Originally an offshoot of McDonald’s, the company expanded aggressively in the years after its founding. At one point, Redbox surpassed Blockbuster as the largest video rental retailer in the country. Now, of course, that’s all over, thanks to the dominance of streaming.

Two years ago, a subsidiary of the company that publishes the Chicken Soup for the Soul self-help book series bought Redbox. Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment took on $325 million in debt when it acquired the company, with the plan of reinventing the ailing business. Instead, the company wracked up an enormous amounts of debt and was forced to file for bankruptcy this past August. As part of the bankruptcy deal, Redbox had to be liquidated. The Verge reports that when Chicken Soup filed for bankruptcy this summer, it had been “sued over a dozen times over unpaid bills.”