The 20-year-old DVD rental kiosk business Redbox will shutter, with a Delaware bankruptcy court judge approving parent company Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment's request to shift its proceedings from Chapter 11 restructuring to Chapter 7 liquidation.
Also read: End of the Line for Chicken Soup — Redbox Owner Files for Bankruptcy
Redbox’s 24,000 remaining kiosks will be closed and sold at auction, and the 1,033 remaining Redbox employees will lose their jobs.
The move marks an inglorious in for two venerable niche media brands, after Chicken Soup made an ill-fated decision two years ago to take on $325 million in debt by acquiring Redbox.
At the time, Redbox — which had recently conducted a SPAC IPO — was struggling in its attempt to convert a user base of streaming late adopters into regular AVOD users.
Chicken Soup fared no better in this quest. And now, Redbox — a business first incubated in Chicago in 2004 by former McDonald’s executive Gregg Kaplan, and which peaked in 2012 with 43,500 kiosk locations nationwide — is no more.
Chicken Soup for the Soul, meanwhile, started in the late 1990s as a line of self-help books out of Cos Cob, Connecticut.
