Alita: Battle Angel is $5.99 to rent in HD right now on Amazon.
Redbox is charging $2.12 for all Blu-ray releases on disc, including Alita. Their streaming version is also $5.99 in HD.
Hard to imagine running those kiosks 24/7, maintaining them and stocking them is cheaper than serving up a stream version. They're no doubt charging $5.99 because they're confident that they can command it based on convenience (laziness factor). $3-$3.50 for a new release in HD is around the edge of reasonable in my opinion; and $1 to $2 for everything else.
I know someone that owned a rental chain (the old style physical stores) in the 1980s and early 1990s. At any given time 15-20% of their sales came from late fees. Also interesting is that VHS tapes once cost $70-$100 ($40-$60 wholesale; $55 in 1984 is $140 today), so there was a serious investment and risk in renting them out to customers at the time. Stores typically purchased the tapes outright from the studios back then (so you can imagine the VHS tape inventory costs); more recently many independent stores switched to a shared revenue model, where they didn't have to front cash for inventory.
Blockbuster was also running bricks-and-mortar stores, and buying physical DVDs, and replacing them when they broke/wore out/weren't returned. A digital "rental", on the other hand, has basically zero marginal cost.
Reckless Video is also still in operation at Roosevelt and 90th in Maple Leaf.
Location and inventory are now irrelevant, and recommendations are instantly accessible on the web. Viewing devices typically have multiple rental provider options.
The only things left to compete on are be bitrate and price.
Wait, where is this world you speak of?
I have a Netflix streaming subscription and it's way inferior in terms of selection to when I used their DVD mailing service ten years ago.
But it sounds like you're renting individual titles. I am a bit of a movie buff into old and slightly obscure titles so I went to Google Play and tried three of my old favorites from the 1990s off the top of my head. None of them were available. (I didn't even try the truly obscure stuff.)
On the other side of the market, Avengers: Infinity War is $10 to rent on Google Play!
Where is this place I can go where they have everything and it's all $5?
https://play.google.com/store/movies/details?id=OxzKb4a1Qc4
I’ve never heard of a $10 rental though sometimes new releases are only available for purchase for an initial period.
For the three movies that aren’t listed I’m guessing they haven’t been digitized, which is usually a decision by the content owners who don’t see the ROI of paying for film scanning yet. It’s true there could be a niche streaming service that pays this upfront cost for an agreement to be the exclusive provider for a while but the economics of that would be rough.
Anyhow... was one of the folks who actually still did DVDs. I've got one gadget that can read a blu-ray, and the rest are either computer systems or have an up-scalar built into them. The newer format is crisper... but man, the endless unstoppable previews really took away the luster. With streaming... the DVD quality is about the same all things considered. I use to fly frequently, so ripping the movies to a tablet or laptop on the weekend, hop on a plane Monday, back Friday, and swap out for the next set was really easy to do with DVD.
Why wouldn't I watch DVDs in 2019?
Unfortunately, having pretty much put other DVD rental out of business, it means that you're pretty much stuck with buying discs if something isn't available digitally.
I assume that the vast bulk of Netflix' DVD rentals are new releases just as they were with Blockbuster. So they're essentially a Redbox competitor.
Netflix simply has no interest is servicing a long tail of DVD rentals. And no one else has figured out how to make that long tail profitable either. You're welcome to give it a shot.
I am not interested in giving money to Amazon due to how they treat their warehouse workers, and I'm not interested in trying to get itunes to run on linux.