I know what you’re immediately thinking, “isn’t Redbox out of business?” Yes, yes it is. The DVD kiosk company went belly up in July of this year and filed for bankruptcy. Not the fun kind of restructuring chapter 11 bankruptcy either; they went for the chapter 7 liquidation kind. Something had to be done with those kiosks and technology/media enthusiasts have bought them up when possible. It would seem their purchases came with a quirk- none of them will dispense “Twister.“
You know, “Twister,” the 1996 disaster movie starring the late Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt? Yup, that movie is refusing to be dispensed by the machines, even when people are trying to crack the software. The real kicker is no one knows why. It’s bizarre in that this is being reported by multiple Redbox owners and it’s the only film that this is happening with.
The dilemma with this is not the desire to watch the movie, obviously. If you wanted to really watch two people survive an F5 tornado by strapping themselves to a pipe with a leather belt, you could get the movie in a number of different ways. Hell, even if you wanted to watch it from the kiosk, nothing is stopping anyone from breaking the thing open with a hammer and tearing the movie out of it. But, as you can imagine, those who were lucky enough to snap up these legacy media dispensers don’t want to break them to pieces.
This situation is an interesting software conundrum. Why “Twister?” What’s going on with the software of the kiosk that is stopping owners from accessing the film? Reportedly they’re getting the error message, “Sorry, there was a problem with the purchased items in your cart. Please remove these items from your cart in order to continue.” There are two theories being passed around at the moment but neither of them have been confirmed or proven.
One theory is that it’s just a technical glitch that just happens to be affecting that film, and we could be having a conversation about Harrison Ford‘s “Air Force One” or Brendan Fraser‘s “George of the Jungle” if the circumstances were different.
The other running theory is that maybe there’s something going on with licensing rights to the film. The spiritual successor, “Twisters” was coming out in July and perhaps the agreements to let the original film be rented out came to a halt. Good theory but it also seems like if that was the case then maybe they would have figured it out by now. Alas, it’s one of life’s great mysteries at the moment. Maybe we just need to create a Dorothy device that we can throw into the kiosk so we can get better telemetry.
