It’s a Friday night and you are in the mood for a movie alone or with friends and family.  You stop at a Redbox and pick out the movies you want, making sure as you read the movie description that captions are provided as stated.

You head home, relax on the couch with your popcorn and soda, and get comfortable as you watch the previews.  As the menu comes on, you go to “Set Up” and you find…..that no captions exist. – all that’s listed is Audio and Commentary, which certainly do not relate  Frustrated, you try to put on the captions from the remote menu, only to have caption settings not work on that either.  

Your next resort is to turn up the volume, and as you do so, the voices become louder, more distorted and certainly not more understandable than before.  You watch for a few minutes, but you can tell you won’t be able to catch most of what is being said in the movie,  Finally, you sigh and take out the movie from the DVD player  Enough is enough. The movie doesn’t have captions even if the movie description mentions captions as included.  Wasted money, wasted time, loss of enjoyment of seeing a movie.  Feeling ripped off and seeing your relaxing movie night go to waste, you return the movie and hope that the next movie won’t have the same problem.

Unfortunately, it is a continuous problem.  Having rented several movies from Redbox with the movie description stating clearly that captioning is provided, I have had to return them later that night simply because they didn’t have the captions on the menu as it said.  This seems to happen with less popularized movies or ones that are not playing in theater “claiming” to have captions for viewers. There is no way to verify that these movies have captions until you actually  rent it, play it and see for yourself.   

If you have a complaint about a movie not having captions as it said in the movie description on Redbox, you can contact the company. 

https://redbox.custhelp.com/app/ask – this is the link to contact customer service via internet.  There is also a phone number to call is 1.866.733.2693 (customer service). The hours to call are between 7 am-3 am 7 days a week.  

Perhaps with enough people with hearing loss taking a stand for their rights for captions on Redbox movies, the company will change their policy and be accommodating.  Until that happens, they will never take us seriously and we will continue to experience the woes of uncaptioned movies that claim to be captioned.