In 1996, Twister was one of the first DVDs ever released. In 2024, Twister is the last DVD trapped inside Redbox DVD rental kiosks.
In recent weeks, thousands of DVDs have been “liberated” from abandoned Redbox machines all over the U.S. after the bankruptcy of the rental kiosk’s parent company. But a bizarre and still unexplained software error is preventing anyone from renting Twister, meaning that single movie is stuck inside many of the machines. To be clear, this is not happening with any other DVD, only Twister.
Even after the bankruptcy of Redbox’s parent company, many kiosks have remained online and more-or-less functional. But for reasons that remain unclear to everyone, including, so far, the community of tinkerers who have taken machines home to reverse engineer them, Redbox machines simply refuse to rent out Twister for what appears to be either a licensing dispute or software bug.
When trying to check out with Twister, the machine attempts to authorize payment, waits a few seconds, then displays an error message that says “Sorry, there was a problem with the purchased items in your cart. Please remove these items from your cart in order to continue.” A video of this process has been uploaded to YouTube by a channel called HackModNerd:
This is not an isolated incident. This is happening when trying to rent Twister on seemingly every Redbox kiosk and is not happening with any other movie, according to various Reddit threads and many users on the Redbox Tinkering Discord, which I wrote about earlier this month. The fact that Twister is unrentable has become lore within end-of-life Redbox circles.
“Twister being a real pain in the ass in these kiosks,” one Discord user wrote.
Reddit threads about this include “FYI I could not rent Twister,” “Anyone else getting this error message when trying to rent Twister,” and “Can someone try renting Twister from a working Redbox?” I have not found anyone who has been able to successfully rent the movie Twister from any Redbox machine in the last month, and lots of the comments are things like “This seems systemic as it’s [happened] at no less than eight boxes.”
The mystery of Twister has also been a regular discussion topic in the Redbox Tinkerers Discord. Currently, a leading theory is that perhaps Redbox’s licensing agreement for Twister ran out ahead of the release of its sequel, Twisters, and there is a hard-coded date where checking out with Twister in your cart was disabled, though no one has been able to find code that confirms this.
This problem has been going on for several weeks at least, though there was a small and perhaps exciting update Thursday afternoon. One person, who goes by the username Ben on Discord and who has has been tinkering with a Redbox machine they took home said they were getting the “issue with item in cart” error trying to “rent” Twister from themselves but were able to rent it if the DVD was physically moved to a different “deck” within the machine, which are the physical racks where the DVDs are stored.
Ben said they physically moved Twister to every deck within the device, and it finally worked when it was located on the eighth deck.
“Tried every deck starting from 1 and skipping 3 since it was already in there,” they said. “Landed on 8 and it let me rent it. Moved it from deck to deck, then did a sync job on the specific slot so it picked it up.”
Ben is not sure why this solved the problem: “Honestly it’s a miracle it worked,” they told me.
There is still one reliable way to get Twister out of a Redbox machine. The way to do this is to take the entire device home, open it, and clean it out. Several people have gotten Redbox versions of Twister this way, and they say there is nothing remarkable about the barcode on the DVD or on its case.
Warner Brothers and Universal Pictures did not respond to a request for comment.
Twister was the first feature film ever released on DVD (it was released March 25, 1997). Several other DVDs were released that day but none of them were feature films. Several artists also released DVDs before Twister but they were not commercially available. So, Twister has become famous on the internet for being the “first DVD.” So, it was famous for being the first of something. Now it will be famous for being the last of something.
