Image courtesy of WBD Home Entertainment
Rooster Teeth may have just headed to the great DTC vault in the sky, thanks to yet another round of closures and cuts at its latest parent company, but red vs. Blue lives on for one more season. red vs. Blue Restoration, a feature-length movie, will debut for sale online on May 7, with digital rentals available two weeks later, said Warner Bros. Discovery Home Entertainment.
The 19th and final season of RvB, the snarky, gamer-inspired animated series that largely launched the pioneering online video and fan site 21 years ago, will be different in a lot of ways. First, there’s that feature-length approach, after nearly two decades of goofy episodics featuring two groups of sci-fi soldiers from the hit game franchise Helloendlessly battling each other in Blood Gulch.
There’s also the fact that Rooster Teeth is shutting down. WBD, still laboring with $40 billion in debt after two years of brutal cuts, sell-offs, shutdowns, and layoffs, announced last week that Rooster Teeth would close. Warner executives said they’d attempted to sell the site, but amid a continuing frigid climate for older digital and legacy media outlets, found no takers.
There’s still a possibility that WBD will find buyers for rights to make more red vs. Blue and other popular Rooster Teeth shows such as RWBY and gene: LOCK. In the meantime, the movie release in home entertainment for sale and two weeks later, rental, is being described as “the final chapter” in a trailer that was also released today (see below).
The new movie is written by Rooster Teeth co-founder Burnie Burns and directed by Matt Hullum, another co-founder.
Getty Images for Otter Media
“red vs. Blue has been a cornerstone of Rooster Teeth’s legacy, and we’re immensely proud of what we’ve accomplished together,” said Hullum in a release.
Burns said he was excited “to conclude this incredible twenty-one year journey with our longtime fans.”
Burns has talked publicly about RvB‘s importance to the development of Rooster Teeth as it built a strong fan connection, eventually launching RTX, a popular annual conference of all the RT brands and programs. The company launched RvB online even before YouTube, finding an audience through its website and with physical media.
Rooster Teeth was acquired in 2014 by online-video company Fullscreen, which became part of Otter Media, and then part of one of the many predecessor iterations of Warner Bros. Discovery. As part of AT&TT by way of WarnerMedia, in 2021 the telephone company sought a Rooster Teeth buyer even then. When AT&T spun WarnerMedia off into a $43 billion, highly leveraged merger with Discovery Media, Rooster Teeth went along, but its prospects never quite brightened.
Here’s a trailer for the upcoming movie:
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I’m a Los Angeles-based columnist, speaker, podcaster and consultant focused on the collision of tech, media and entertainment. I also host and produce the Bloom in Tech podcast. In my long and winding career, I previously worked as an award-winning writer and editor for publications such as Variety, Deadline, Red Herring, and the Los Angeles Daily News, and have been a communications exec at MGM, the USC Marshall School of Business, and the Los Angeles city redevelopment agency. I’m a graduate of the University of Missouri, the world’s greatest journalism school, and loving progenitor of two remarkable descendants.
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