Alas, poor Redbox…

And so another era has come to an end. The final years of Redbox are reaching their final stretch. The service officially announced its closure the other day, after a disastrous ownership changeover a few years ago wrecked the remainder of the business, one of the last bastions of physical media, much less the last holdout of the rental market.

Surprisingly, I only got into Redbox circa 2016, when I accidentally rented, instead of bought, the trio of Passengers, The Magnificent Seven, and Fences (although later I did make up for that). I used to rent movies all the time, even worked at a video store, which was how I caught up on the vast chunk of movie history that served as the foundation for my appreciation of the medium. By the time Redbox was the last of the rental services, I was buying outright in stores any movie (new and used) that interested me. But once I understood that Redbox sold used movies at a considerable discount, I started buying at their kiosks at a decent clip.

I found a lot of interesting movies through them, some mainstream that I had skipped and probably would never have seen without such an opportunity, some obscure movies that I would almost certainly have never even heard of and was glad of the chance to discover them, and sure, a lot of movies that weren’t really worth the time or scant money it took to spend on them.

I was very much aware that the market was skipping along to digital and streaming as outright replacement. I didn’t care. 

2020 was the breaking point for Redbox. Disney stopped shipping new MCU titles that year, possibly in the interests of shoring up their streaming service, suddenly so crucial even to them, when I really would’ve preferred to catch those releases without investing too much in them. I still haven’t seen Shang-Chi or Eternals, and I might never at this point. But otherwise new releases continued to populate. 

That was also the year the market started to cut loose from physical media in general, which again, was an obvious side effect of the pandemic. 

Eventually Redbox started to more heavily feature B- and C-level movies in the purchase tab, since they were receiving fewer mainstream movies as they lost business from major studios. The listings started stretching out with slower turnover rates for new titles. 

The last major, and almost the only major, release last year was Barbie. But this was one miracle Barbie couldn’t pull off.

The “coming soon” tab was deactivated. Then it became clear that there weren’t new movies populating at all, and some of us wondered if there could possibly be a turnaround. But it wasn’t to be.

On Friday I attempted to scoop up a few titles still of some interest from the purchase tab, but the box shut down in the effort. I tried again an hour or so ago, and it was functioning again. What Redbox does with all the inventory that wasn’t for sale previously, if they’re listed for purchase at some point, who knows?

I may have just bought my last movies from Redbox. It was a fruitful time.