As I started figuring out last year, Black Friday as a shopping event for getting blu-rays on sale was in real danger. During this past year Best Buy stopped selling movies altogether. Target has cut way back with some stores having nothing, but for the holidays they did have a cardboard stand out at some stores with blu-rays and DVD’s, including recent titles, but unfortunately, no 4k movies. The prices weren’t great either, about $15 for a blu-ray, but you could get it down to $10 potentially with the Buy 2, Get 1 Free sale they had going on. There are so few new movies I would want on blu-ray (as opposed to 4k) that it doesn’t work and even $10 is steep for a blu-ray when Best Buy would sell them for $5-$10 and I could reduce that substantially with reward certificates. I hoped Best Buy would get shippers like Target did, but, nope, they are completely done with movies. I had $40 in certificates for Best Buy so I put those towards a new Samsung phone instead. Last year Walmart’s blu-ray deals were actually through Gruv, an online store run by Universal. This year, again, they had no deals in the stores.
Gruv still has decent deals on things from Universal and Warner Brothers mostly, so I picked up 4k’s of Oppenheimer and Dune: Part Two for $12.99 each. But as of January 1, all online and even purchases of digital movies now have Georgia sales tax. No wonder Georgia has a revenue surplus: they have secretly passed the biggest tax increase in Georgia history just by closing those loopholes. Gruv had a 3 4k for $30 deal on some titles, but I had a hard time picking three from their list. I thought about getting Puss in Boots (which I have on blu-ray already, but would go with my 4k of its sequel), The Color Purple (1985), and Tar. I started watching Tar, but it was slow and I wasn’t crazy about it. I have Color Purple on HD digital, which is probably fine for a movie that age. I could get E.T. instead of Tar, but some people said the 4k doesn’t look that great. I already have E.T. on blu-ray and a 4k digital copy.
Amazon usually just matches other places, but with nobody to match, their prices weren’t that great. Still, they had a decent random deal on the 4k of Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse for $10.99, then I picked up the 4k of Close Encounters of the Third Kind for $9.99 to upgrade my blu-ray.
That leaves digital purchases. Around Black Friday you can get decent deals on Vudu (now Fandango at Home) gift cards, and even rarer, discounts on iTunes (now Apple Store) gift cards. Then you can take advantage of sales on digital movies. I was able to get a $100 Apple gift card for $100 and the discount was a free $15 Best Buy gift card. Amazon would have a similar deal later, wich would have been better, but the Best Buy card never expires at least. I got some Vudu gift cards online from Kroger for 20% off. A bunch of fuel points also showed up on my shopper card at Kroger and I think that was from those cards, so that will save me about $6 on a fill up.
With money in my Vudu and iTunes accounts to burn now, I picked up Inside Out 2 at Vudu at $9.99 figuring it wouldn’t get lower than that for a while. Then Marcel the Shell with Shoes On went on sale for $5, so I picked that up. Stop Making Sense in 4k was available for $7.99 and it is one of my favorites (the 4k blu-ray version is a boutique collector’s edition for $60), so I scooped that up too. I’ve never had that one in any format.
Wonka is now on sale for $8 as well and I had a $2 digital credit at Amazon, so I got that for $6. Then Apple had a two-movie bundle of The Birdcage and the French film it was based on, La Cage aux Folles, for $5, so I got that. So I am still getting a decent amount of movies, but not as much fun as going to Best Buy in years past.