Nobody Can Rent Twister, the Last DVD Trapped in Redbox’s Dead Video Business
Hardware nerds just want to see Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt outrun a tornado. Why isn't that possible?
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.
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In 1996, Twister was one of the first DVDs ever released. In 2024, Twister is the last DVD trapped inside Redbox DVD rental kiosks.
In recent weeks, thousands of DVDs have been “liberated” from abandoned Redbox machines all over the U.S. after the bankruptcy of the rental kiosk’s parent company. But a bizarre and still unexplained software error is preventing anyone from renting Twister, meaning that single movie is stuck inside many of the machines. To be clear, this is not happening with any other DVD, only Twister.
Even after the bankruptcy of Redbox’s parent company, many kiosks have remained online and more-or-less functional. But for reasons that remain unclear to everyone, including, so far, the community of tinkerers who have taken machines home to reverse engineer them, Redbox machines simply refuse to rent out Twister for what appears to be either a licensing dispute or software bug.