In news eerily reminiscent of the last time we had really food poisoning, it sounds like a whole bunch of Chicken Soup is about to be emptied straight into the toilet. Specifically, that faith-based grandparent bookshelf ballast provider Chicken Soup For The Soul is liquidating in a Chapter 7 bankruptcy, which means, among other things, that every remaining Redbox kiosk in America is probably about to be shut down. The DVD rental service—whose noble efforts to suck the last ounces of blood out of the physical media rental market stretch back to the early 2000s, when they were initially founded ( ) as self-serve grocery vending machines owned and operated by McDonald’s—has bounced between a number of owners over the years, eventually .
The company’s efforts to revitalize the brand were kind of genuinely hilarious—at one point, in order to, we don’t know, keep your last living brain cell occupied while you were busy scanning through direct-to-DVD Gerard Butler movies—but ultimately futile. Chicken Soup, which also owns Crackle, 1091 Pictures, and of the Laurel & Hardy film library, went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy a few weeks ago; now, it’s shifted into Chapter 7, which means it has to start liquidating assets. That includes shutting down the remaining 24,000 Redbox kiosks, dashing the dreams of people everywhere with a fetish for peering frustratedly at sun-damaged touchscreens while standing in a trash-strewn CVS parking lot.
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