Richard Drew/AP
Rooster Soup for the Soul Leisure executives ring the opening bell on the Nasdaq in 2017.
New York
CNN
—
The mother or father firm of Redbox, these distinctive, red-colored kiosks at grocery shops that promote or hire DVDs, has filed for chapter after enduring months of monetary wrestle.
Rooster Soup for the Soul Leisure (CSSE) revealed in a submitting that it has almost $1 billion in debt and owes hundreds of thousands of {dollars} to a number of leisure corporations together with the BBC and Sony Photos, plus to retailers starting from Walmart to Walgreens.
Filings present that the corporate took on about $325 million in debt following its buy of Redbox in 2022 from personal fairness big Apollo World Administration. The plan was to make it into an leisure conglomerate, combining the DVD rental enterprise with its free streaming providers, like Crackle, the leisure platform as soon as owned by Sony.
These plans didn’t pan out, hindered by twin Hollywood strikes that restricted manufacturing of contemporary content material and the decline of individuals renting bodily DVDs that even compelled rival Netflix to stop that a part of its enterprise final yr.
CSSE declined to remark.
Deadline beforehand reported that Redbox hadn’t paid workers for every week, and medical advantages have been suspended. Submitting for Chapter 11 chapter might assist the corporate repair these points if its plans are authorized by a court docket in Delaware.
The corporate’s publishing arm, which produces these ubiquitous self-help books that had been as soon as a worldwide phenomenon, isn’t affected by the chapter submitting of its leisure unit.
The variety of Redbox kiosks has grown to about 34,000 throughout the US, largely situated at grocery and drug shops. Since its 2002 launch, Redbox has rented its 1 billion discs at costs cheaper than cable, based on its web site.