A few weeks ago Best Buy announced it would stop selling selling DVD’s and Blu-rays in 2024. They, as well as Walmart and Target, have been shrinking their media section for years, so it makes sense those other two may stop selling movies soon as well. I’ve been writing about Black Fridays for years and what movies I picked up, but this might be the last time that happens. Like last year, there aren’t really any ads anymore featuring all of the movies that will be on sale on Black Friday. And without those ads things are chaotic. Like in past years, Black Friday isn’t really one day so much as the whole month of November, though maybe not as spread out as during Covid when they were trying to keep crowds down.
Best Buy started things off with its first Black Friday sale on October 27-29, but only for paying members of Best Buy Plus or Total Tech. For “everyone else” the sale was to start October 30. They did have some good deals for members in that first round with a number of 4k blu-ray movies priced around $9.99. Plus I had saved up $40 worth of Best Buy rewards from points earned on my Best Buy credit card that would lower the price even further. But when the sale for everyone else came along on October 30, the deals were off. A few days later a couple of arty movies came out at only $6.99 on blu-ray (no 4k available) including The Menu, Banshees of Inisherin, and Empire of Light. I didn’t like Banshees, hadn’t seen Menu, and Light didn’t get good reviews, so I used a $5 certificate to get The Menu1 for $1.99. Those went out of stock fairly quickly, but kept coming back sporadically and Amazon would match the price while they were available.
Best Buy often resets prices on Monday at 1 AM Eastern time, so on November 6, the previously exclusive sale prices actually showed up. I ordered four 4k movies for pickup from my local store: Top Gun: Maverick2, Rebel Without a Cause3, Pulp Fiction4, and Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon5. Maverick was my favorite movie of 2022 (a very weak year, honestly). Pulp Fiction is a favorite I already had on DVD and then blu-ray. Rebel Without a Cause is on the AFI top 100 list so I got it having never seen it all the way through (I had a digital copy already in HD that I probably should have watched first because I don’t know if I will like it that much). I’m not a martial arts fan really, so I went out on a limb for Enter the Dragon figuring it has to be one of the best martial arts movies of all time and therefore worth owning. I used $30 worth of certificates to get the prices on those four down to about $2 each.
Walmart said they would have a movie sale for online orders only starting November 8 for Walmart Plus members and November 10 for everyone else. Walmart hasn’t been a strong contender the last few years, but will sometimes have a couple of good movie deals. They seem to focus more on selling DVD’s while I’m trying to stick to 4k’s and sometimes blu-rays. As it turned out, their sale was mostly through a third party seller, GRUV Entertainment, a web storefront run by Universal that I have gotten a lot of titles from. They had some decent prices, but I was waiting for Best Buy’s next big sale where I could pay less out of pocket by using reward certificates. Also, there was never any word that Walmart would have any movies on sale in their store like they usually do. People who worked there said they hadn’t received any pallets of movies with the rest of the Black Friday merchandise like in the past. Looking at Gruv, they offered 15% off on their eBay store prices (which were mostly the same as the Walmart prices) if you bought two movies, so I picked two movies that hadn’t been mentioned in any other sales, but that I enjoyed, She Said6 and Polite Society7, both on blu-ray with no 4k available.
On the blu-ray forum people who work at Best Buy (or customers sometimes) will post pictures of cardboard cases of movies in the store called shippers that are put out for Black Friday. They had a shipper with $5.99 and up titles on one side and $9.99 and up titles on the other (the disappointing part being “and up”). That first wave of movies came from those shippers, but not everything on the shippers was in the sale and the sale prices were not effective yet. A guy who works there said those shippers, plus ones from Disney/Fox and Sony would go on sale on November 13, but prices were unknown. I had a few titles I was interested in from movies that came out this year or last year: Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and then from Disney Wakanda Forever, Ant-Man Quantumania, Guardians of the Galaxy 3, Strange World, and Elemental. Last year Best Buy didn’t have great deals on Disney stuff, but Target came through unexpectedly on some 4k movies for below $10. November 13 came and the prices never reset. Looking at Best Buy’s schedule, they said Black Friday deals would start on November 17, so maybe that was when prices would come down. However, our inside guy said November 13 had fallen through and it would actually be November 14 (more chaos!). I woke up in the middle of the night to see what they had and the prices had dropped! Not only that, but I had earned a few more certificates, so I was able to order four more 4k movies using $25 in certificates to get them down to about $3 each: Puss in Boots: The Last Wish8, and then classics Speed9, The Untouchables10, and Casablanca11. I thought I had Untouchables, but it was a DVD, and Speed was a movie I liked and had thought about getting before. Casablanca I already had on blu-ray and while I generally don’t see the point of getting old movies on 4k, AFI says it is the second best movie of all time and I agree, so I got the upgrade (they say Godfather is third best, which I don’t agree with, so while its 4k was also on sale, I stayed put with my blu-ray copy and my 4k digital copy; while I buy a lot of movies, there are a lot more that I don’t buy). Once again, Best Buy’s prices on Disney titles were not very good, $16 for the older Marvel movies and $23 for the more recent Guardians 3. For some unknown reason, Disney only released 4k versions of Strange World and Elemental as limited edition steelbook cases (Best Buy exclusives at $40; they were marked down to $19 on Thanksgiving Day, still expensive) so those aren’t available in 4k like everything else (Disney also sells 4k editions as a Disney Movie Club exclusive, which I don’t belong to now anyway, for $35, still too much). Even the blu-rays were $12 on those, but I have upgraded too many blu-rays to 4k later, so I would rather just go straight to 4k than throw money away on a blu-ray. Digital 4k copies of Strange World and Elemental were available for $9.99 on Vudu, so that might be an option if they don’t want to sell 4k discs. Sony was no help either, with a sale price of $17 on Across the Spider-Verse in 4k (which is only part 1; part 2 comes out next year).
I felt like that was mostly it for Best Buy, though there could be new items on Black Friday or after. Target had a Black Friday ad eventually promoting their Buy 2, Get 1 Free sale on movies, books, and music, showing a few of the movie titles. It sounds like stores got one big shipper with about 30 titles on it, but mostly blu-rays, though Spider-Verse would be there, though no price listed. At 3 AM the sale went into effect online, but Spider-Verse was $18, so even if you found two other movies at the same price, they would average out to $12 each. I also had a coupon for 20% off a purchase, which would get it below $10 before tax. But the problem was finding two other movies I wanted, hopefully in that price range, but all I found was the blu-ray of the highly praised Are You There, God? It’s Me Margaret for $13, which would be the free one if it had the lowest price and only realize a discount of $4.33 off Spider-Verse putting it at $13.67 before the 20% discount. I could combine it with the 4k of The Flash for $15, but reviews were only so-so for that one. If I ordered for shipping, there was a bigger selection, but to get free shipping, you had to order at least $35, which means I would need to buy six titles. Then stuff like Beetlejuice, Jaws, Jurassic Park, Planes, Trains, and Automobiles would be available, but those were pretty marginal or were just upgrades from blu-rays I have already. Ultimately, I will just skip the sale at Target and hope a better deal materializes for Spider-Verse and maybe Me Margaret.
At some point, iTunes had a great sale on The West Wing Complete Series for $14.99. I had the first five seasons on DVD from way back (each season was more than $15), but got the digital set so I have all seven seasons and in HD.
After not seeing good deals on Disney/Marvel titles, I decided I might just buy digital copies, which were on sale for $9.99 in 4k. That would be great for Strange World and Elemental which didn’t have standard 4k releases on disc. Marvel titles like Quantumania, Wakanda Forever, and Guardians 3 were released on 4k, so I might be able to find a second hand 4k code that came with those. In fact, I did find a code for $4 for Wakanda Forever and then Target was selling $25 Vudu gift cards for $20, plus I had gotten $5 in cash back from Microsoft movies I’ve been buying, so by my math I only paid $15 for the card and bought $9.99 ($5.99 after discounts) 4k digital copies of Strange World and Elemental since no stores even sell physical copies in 4k. Digital copies of Guardians 3 and Ant-Man Quantumania are also on sale at Vudu for $9.99, but I will hold off on those in case a good sale comes along for a physical 4k copy.
I don’t know why Disney would decide not to print 4k copies for normal retail sale, but that may be the future. In fact, Me Margaret is also available in 4k online (only $7.99 on sale at Amazon and iTunes, but not Vudu), but only blu-ray in stores (not a Disney title, it is distributed by Lionsgate). That made me check She Said and Polite Society which were blu-ray only, but they are both available in 4k online, this time distributed by Universal. Going back further, it looks like The Menu (Disney/Fox again) is also available in 4k online only, but I only got HD because that is what came with the disc. So I bought 3 blu-rays in HD with digital HD copies when I could have gotten 4k digital copies for less. If it continues that way, that could be pretty much the end of buying physical discs for me, which I knew was possible in the next couple of years, but I didn’t think would happen right now. Truly a black Black Friday.
When Black Friday actually arrived, it was just as anticlimatic as I feared. No new deals at Best Buy or Target, and Walmart never put out any movies on sale in their stores. It was probably too early to give up, but I went ahead and got another $25 Vudu gift card from Target for $20 and bought 4k digital copies of Guardians 3 and Quantumania, fearing they might not stay on sale for long. I earn about three $5 gift cards for the Microsoft store each month for doing Microsoft rewards (mostly using Bing as my search engine). I usually get $4.99 movies, but I need to save up so I can get some of the more recent titles for $9.99 instead of paying real money for Vudu gift cards.
Over the Black Friday weekend, I was able to buy a code for a 4k digital copy of the Spider-Verse movie for only $4, so I can knock that off of my list. I used some of my remaining Vudu gift card to get a 4K copy of Chinatown, which I thought I had on blu-ray, but it was only DVD. Then on Sunday, out of the blue, someone I know on the forum sent me a code for a HD digital copy of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, which was really the only other thing on my list right now. Other than Oppenheimer and this year’s Mission: Impossible movies, which just came out on home video and aren’t on sale. And I would have picked up Asteroid City if it was cheaper than $10 for just a blu-ray and HD copy, when the 4k is the same price online. I think that price will come down and it wasn’t Wes Anderson’s best work anyway.
Cyber Monday rolled around and Best Buy just continued their existing Black Friday deals, but now less likely to have things in stock. Still nothing at Walmart and Target’s sale was already over. Vudu and iTunes didn’t seem to have any new sales either, at least not much. I used $15 in certificates to buy a Fitbit on sale at Best Buy, figuring nothing else was coming along.
There weren’t many good sales in December either, mostly just sales at the same price points as earlier, or worse. For movies, Best Buy doesn’t generally own the discs in its stores. Instead a distributor sends them to them to sell almost on consignment. Anything that doesn’t sell goes back to the distributor. In fact, a lot of the online orders are shipped directly from the distributor. People expecting big markdowns as Best Buy gets out of the media business will be disappointed since Best Buy will just send the unsold inventory back. The exception to this is Best Buy exclusives. Best Buy works with studios, Disney being a major one, to make exclusive releases of movies, usually using steelbook packaging, a tin case instead of the usual plastic. For Disney’s 100th anniversary, Best Buy released a line of exclusive steelbooks of older Disney movies in 4k. They were like $30 retail. Apparently they can’t send those back to the distributor. This week they marked down what remaining movies from that series that they had to $9.99. For a 4k that’s a great deal. I had found a shortcut earlier in the year where I could buy a secondhand code for a Disney movie, often even if it came from a blu-ray, and redeem it at iTunes where it would be upgraded to 4k and the 4k version would propagate to my linked accounts at Movies Anywhere and Vudu. I was able to get upgrades on the cheap this way for most of my Disney, Pixar, Star Wars, and Marvel titles, and another glitch in the system allowed me to get Disney reward points for each redemption at iTunes. I feel like a 4k disc should give better viewing results since the stream is not as compressed as it is over the internet. So there is an advantage to having a 4k disc, plus some things I didn’t have on 4k disc or digital. I also had saved up another $15 in Best Buy rewards, so I went ahead and bought Snow White12, Cinderella13, Beauty and the Beast14, Moana15, and Iron Man16 4k steelbooks even though I already had all but Snow White and Iron Man in digital 4k already. And I had all of these on blu-ray, so I’m throwing that old money away.
Around the same time iTunes had a great offer of 12 Clint Eastwood movies for $7.99 plus a documentary about him. I already had a number of the movies, but was able to get 5 new movies to add to my digital library and 4 HD copies I had already were upgraded to 4k. That set went up to $50 not much later.
Best Buy had another clearance on more recent Disney 4k steelbooks. I didn’t hear about it until the afternoon and it was in-store or pickup only like the previous deal, but my store still had Wakanda Forever17 available for $9.99 and I was able to use a $5 off certificate. When I got to the store to pick it up, I looked around and even though they showed they were out of stock online, they had Strange World18 for $9.99 too, so I picked that up, using my last $5 off certificate. I sold the 4k codes to recoup most of what I had spent buying digital 4k copies in November. I would have liked to have gotten Quantumania, but the closest store that showed that in stock was 40 miles away. I also found out that with Best Buy exiting media sales this year, Walmart will start selling Disney’s upcoming steelbook exclusives.