“Fandango At Home” no longer just sad dancing advice as NBCU renames Vudu

That Vudu that you do—at least, when every other streaming service or VOD offering doesn’t have the movie you’ve been scrounging around for cheaper—is now no more, Variety reports. NBCUniversal is apparently killing off the 20-year-old video brand as part of its ongoing efforts to find a name for its video on demand movie and TV service that doesn’t immediately repel or irritate viewers. And to that end, they’ve somehow settled on the service’s new name, which no one could roll their eyes at or be annoyed by: “Fandango At Home.”

Besides sounding like a slightly more exotic remix of a Billy Idol 1981 solo hit, “Fandango At Home” also represents a bit of a walk-back from the corporate giant, which had previously killed off the “FandangoNow” branding in favor of Vudu a few years back. We can only assume that was part of an industry-wide initiative to give streaming services or other online video offerings incredibly stupid names—i.e., “the Quibi era”—of which now only Fox’s Tubi and Xumo, also co-owned by NBCU parent company Comcast, seem to remain. Sure, “Fandango At Home” has its own problems, as a name—it creates the image of sad couples attempting to bolero in their cramped kitchens—but at least all the words in it count as language, a huge stride forward for streaming, typically a trove of lexigraphic war crimes.

Vudu users will have their accounts migrated over to the new branding without needing to update anything, although they can now merge their existing Vudu accounts with the ones they already use to buy movie tickets through with Fandango. We imagine that NBCU hopes this will create lively debates within families about whether to “Fandango out” or “Fandango At Home,” but in practical terms, we assume it will just force people to go mad trying to remember where the fuck they bought Wonka, before just deciding to boot up Netflix—which, say what you like about it, has at least stuck with a single stupid name for the past 30 years.