How a McDonald's side project became 24,000 red boxes
Redbox did not begin as a movie company. It began in 2002 inside McDonald's Ventures, the unit the burger chain used to test new reasons for people to pull into the parking lot.
The first machines sold convenience-store goods. By 2004 the idea had narrowed to DVDs, and the whole pitch fit into one number: a dollar a night.
That number did the work. A new release at a Blockbuster store cost several dollars for several days, and a late fee waited at the end of it. Redbox charged a dollar, took the disc back at any kiosk in the network, and never mailed anyone a bill for forgetting.
Coinstar, the company behind the supermarket coin-counting machines, bought its way to full ownership of Redbox in 2009 and pushed the kiosks into every grocery store, pharmacy and gas station that would take one. Renting a movie stopped being a trip and became something you did while waiting for a prescription. At the peak the chain ran more than 43,000 kiosks across the United States and Canada, and about 24,000 were still standing when it shut down.
What actually killed Redbox
Streaming did the slow part, and it had help. The DVR had already moved the video store into the living room, and the HD DVD and Blu-ray format war ended just as the disc itself started shrinking as a business. Redbox revenue peaked in 2013 at $1.97 billion and fell for the next decade.
The company answered with a streaming app, free ad-supported channels and a digital storefront nobody was waiting for. None of it replaced a dollar rental.
The fast part was the balance sheet. Apollo Global Management took Redbox's parent company, Outerwall, private in 2016. In October 2021 Redbox went public again through a merger with the blank-check company Seaport Global Acquisition Corp., landing on Nasdaq under the ticker RDBX. It traded as a meme stock for a few weeks and then came apart.
In August 2022 Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment bought Redbox in an all-stock deal whose real price was the Redbox debt it agreed to carry. That is the sentence that mattered. Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment had not bought a rental chain so much as a pile of borrowed money with kiosks attached, and it never found a way to pay it down.
The Delaware hearing that switched off every kiosk
Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment filed for Chapter 11 protection in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware on June 28, 2024. The petition listed total debts of $970 million against consolidated assets of $414 million as of March 31, 2024.
Chapter 11 is supposed to be a reorganization. This one lasted under two weeks. The lender behind the Redbox purchase declined to put in more money, and on July 10, 2024 the court converted the case into a Chapter 7 liquidation.
There was no soft landing built into it. About 1,000 employees lost their jobs, many of them already owed four weeks of wages, and a trustee was appointed to investigate whether money held in trust for employees had been misappropriated. "1,000 people are about to lose their jobs and they're not even going to be paid for work that they did," Judge Thomas Horan said from the bench, in remarks reported by Variety in 2024. He put the company's position just as plainly: "There is no means to continue to pay employees, to pay any bills."
The kiosks went with the company. A Redbox machine is a terminal: it checks the card, the account and the title against servers that had just stopped existing. All 24,000 of them quit taking rentals, and the app, the website and the free streaming channels went dark on the same schedule.
Why the machines were left bolted to the pavement
Here is the part nobody planned for. In a Chapter 7 liquidation a trustee sells what has value and walks away from what does not. Twenty-four thousand dead vending machines have negative value, so nobody came to collect them.
That left the bill with the stores. A Redbox kiosk can weigh as much as 900 pounds, is usually bolted into concrete and is often hardwired into the building's power, which makes removal a contractor job. Retailers have put the cost at roughly $500 per unit once labor, mechanical work and disposal are counted.
Walgreens took the problem to the court in August 2024. The chain said it was still powering 5,400 Redbox kiosks across about 3,800 locations at a cost of $184,000 a month in electricity, for machines that no longer sold anything. "Walgreens should not be required to continue to 'store' and power Redbox kiosks across the country without any form of payment," the filing read. CVS asked the same court for permission to scrap the kiosks sitting at its stores.
How many Redbox kiosks are left in 2026?
Nobody publishes a running count, because no company owns the fleet any more. What grew instead was a demolition trade. CoolSys, a refrigeration and mechanical services contractor, launched a dedicated Redbox removal and recycling service on February 11, 2025, and says it has since taken out and recycled more than 4,700 kiosks nationwide.
The job is more than lifting. CoolSys disconnects the unit, caps the exposed wiring, grinds the anchor bolts down flush with the concrete and recycles the shell, destroying any customer data the machine still held. "We aim to help retailers easily remove these defunct units while protecting the environment," chief executive Rich Wyckoff said in the 2025 announcement.
The rest went to people who wanted one. Tinkerers asked stores to hand the machines over instead of scrapping them, and a community formed around opening them up, dumping the operating system and working out how the things ran. A dead Redbox is a Windows PC, a disc carousel and a robot arm in a steel cabinet, which is a good weekend for the right person.
So the honest answer in 2026 is thousands, shrinking, on no schedule at all. Some are gone, some are shrouded or turned to face a wall, and some still sit powered at the door of a grocery store with the discs from July 2024 locked inside.
Who owns the Redbox name in 2026?
No one is operating it. The Chapter 7 trustee put the estate's intellectual property up for sale, and the Redbox and Crackle trademarks went to auction on April 23, 2025, alongside film rights held by the parent company's other units.
Buying a trademark is not the same as buying a business. Whoever holds the Redbox name holds a logo and a shade of red, not a kiosk network, not the servers, not the disc supply deals with the studios and not the retail contracts with Walgreens, CVS and the grocery chains. Every one of those was unwound in the bankruptcy.
So the answer to the question people type while standing in front of one of these machines is short. Redbox is not still around. The company was liquidated in 2024, the kiosks are inert, and as of September 2026 no buyer has switched the network back on.
What replaced it is the thing that beat it. Renting a movie now means a digital storefront, and physical rental in the United States has narrowed to libraries, a few independents and the last Blockbuster store in Bend, Oregon.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Redbox still in business in 2026?
No. Redbox stopped operating in July 2024, when parent company Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment converted its Delaware bankruptcy into a Chapter 7 liquidation and all of its roughly 24,000 DVD kiosks stopped taking rentals. The Redbox website, app and streaming channels shut down at the same time, and no company has restarted the service since.
Why are Redbox kiosks still outside stores?
Because nobody was left to pay for hauling them away. When Redbox's parent company was liquidated in July 2024, the Chapter 7 trustee did not remove the kiosks, which left them with the retailers that had hosted them. Each machine can weigh up to 900 pounds and costs a retailer around $500 to take out, so stores have been clearing them slowly: the contractor CoolSys reports recycling more than 4,700 since February 2025.
Who owns Redbox now?
No operating company owns Redbox. The Redbox trademark was put up for sale by the Chapter 7 trustee at an auction held on April 23, 2025, together with the Crackle brand and film rights from the same parent company, and buying the name bought nothing else: the kiosks, the servers and the retail contracts were all dismantled in the 2024 liquidation.