Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment, who acquired Redbox in 2022, has also tried to buy up Netflix’s soon-to-close DVD rental business. The move, had it gone forward, would make Chicken Soup the undisputed king of movie rentals — a title it arguably has either way, considering that most video stores have gone out of business, and if Netflix was making money at it, they would not be closing it down in September. At any rate, Netflix rejected more than one offer from the company, saying that the disc library and website was not for sale, according to Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment CEO Bill Rouhana.
There is obviously nothing stopping Chicken Soup for the Soul from buying up a bunch of DVDs and a website of its own and giving mail-order rental a try. It’s hard to argue, though, that taking on Netflix’s iconic red-and-white envelopes would not have been a huge leg up in trying to make such a model recognizable. Gamefly still offers a DVD-by-mail service ($8.95 per month for DVD and Blu-ray, $13.95 for 4K, or you can pay extra to add on video game rentals), but they don’t have the depth of catalog that Netflix’s DVD.com does.
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“I’d like to buy it,” Rouhana told The Hollywood Reporter on Wednesday. “I wish Netflix would sell me that business instead of shutting it down.”
Redbox already has 32,000 DVD kiosks across the country, and earlier this week, the company announced plans to add another 1,500 kiosks at Dollar General stores. For context, 32,000 kiosks is about three times as many as there were Blockbuster Video stores at the height of the company’s popularity. Of course, Redbox kiosks don’t make the same kind of money that Blockbuster stores did, and they don’t have nearly the depth of catalog, focusing almost exclusively on new releases and a handful of mega-hits that people ask about regularly.
“I have tried like three or four times to reach out to the corporate development people about it but just got rebuffed each time,” Rouhana added. “So when I saw it being closed, I thought, ‘Well, maybe they’ll do it now.’”
No dice, though; Netflix told THR that they don’t plan to sell, and that they do not yet have a plan for what to do with all their stock, which includes many hard-to-find and out-of-print films. Meanwhile, Rouhana told the trade that he expects DVD to remain a strong market in the coming years, especially given the increased fragmentation in the streaming market, where popular movies and shows keep arbitrarily disappearing off the most popular streamers.
