Black Thursday Morning

“Black Friday” has been creeping more and more towards Thursday night when door busting sales start. But really even sooner than that. Best Buy would start their sale online at 1 AM on Thanksgiving Day with most of their big sale prices on blu-rays and DVD’s (which is all I’m after), but not usually the biggest deals. Walmart would start even earlier online, on Thanksgiving Eve, but their online deals are much worse than the advertised in store Black Friday deals. That was true again this year, which was unfortunate because they had some very good deals in the Black Friday ad. I wasn’t planning on staying up until 1 AM for Best Buy’s online deals, but I was up at midnight and the deals were already active, so I picked:

• Black Hawk Down – 4K + Blu-ray + Digital – $9.99 This is a good movie and probably a better book, and I had it on DVD, but wanted to upgrade. $10 is a good price for a 4K version of the movie, but this one was still a little marginal for me. But once I saw all of the deals were active, I went ahead and got it.
• Bumblebee – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital – $5.99 This movie got good reviews and I wanted to see it, though I skipped it at the theater. I had only seen the first Transformers movie and skipped the rest, which got terrible reviews. Probably could have just rented it from Redbox once like I did with Shazam, but oh well.
• It’s a Wonderful Life – Blu-ray – $5.99 This is a classic movie that I have never watched all the way through. It is Number 11 on AFI’s original list of the top 100 movies of all time, so a great addition to my collection. This is a 2016 release, but a couple of months ago they released a 4K edition with a new scan that gets better reviews, plus a blu-ray version based on that scan. This older version doesn’t come with a digital version, but still, a classic. Also includes the colorized version.
• Missing Link – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital – $5.99 I just recently watched Coraline, a stop motion animation movie by the same studio, LAIKA, and enjoyed it. Missing Link got good reviews this year but did not do well at the box office. There were a couple of bigfoot animated movies this year so maybe this one got lost, or it was just the goofy looking bigfoot that turned people off.
• Mission: Impossible – 6 Movie Collection – Blu-ray + Digital – $12.99 I have a couple of these on digital already and would definitely buy the 6th movie if I could get it for $6, so getting all 6 movies for $13 seemed like a pretty good deal. The last 3 have gotten good reviews, but 1 and 2 were kind of mixed.
• Star Trek (2009) – 4K + Blu-ray + Digital – $7.99 A really good price on a 4K movie, plus I already had its two sequels with Chris Pine as Captain Kirk on Blu-ray, so I wanted this anyway and am willing to pay a couple of dollars extra for 4K.
• Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital – $3.99 This movie had a huge budget and bombed. But it is supposed to be visually spectacular and I kind of wanted to see how someone could blow $180 million making a bad movie. I was not willing to ante an extra $4 to get 4K.

At checkout, I was able to use $50 in reward certificates, mostly from buying a TV earlier in the year, but also from using my Best Buy credit card, so my total from Best Buy came out to be $3.16 and I still have a few $5 certificates left. They said I should receive the package by Wednesday, though they often do separate shipments.

Since Walmart’s online sale is never good and you don’t want to get stuck in the crowd scene at door busting time, what I have done before is go the morning of Thanksgiving and see if I can find titles that will be on sale that evening on the shelf (they absolutely will not let you open the shippers before the door busting event). They usually ring up at the same price. Last year I tried this, but they didn’t have the one title I wanted on the shelf. I tried again this year, looking for about 4 titles, and got the same result. But last year I had gone to the Decatur Walmart after door busting and they had that title on the shelf, so I went there. They had everything I wanted:

• Avengers: Endgame – 4K + Blu-ray + Digital – $7.96 Walmart blew people away when their Black Friday ad was released a few weeks ago by having a bunch of 4K movies for only $7.96. Nobody else even came close. I was definitely going to buy this, but would probably wait and get it through the Disney Movie Club (average price around $8), but that would be for blu-ray, not 4K. So I couldn’t pass this up.
• John Wick 3 – 4K + Blu-ray + Digital – $7.96 I have seen the first two John Wick movies and liked them but was not as crazy about them as some, but didn’t see the third (which got better reviews), so I figure I could spend about what a movie ticket would cost to get this one in UHD. Very good price on a 2019 movie.
• Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital – $5.96 This was one of my favorite movies of last year, won an Oscar for best animated film, and was way better than the recent live action Spider-Man movies, so I was hoping for a good price. Walmart beat Best Buy’s $7.99 sale price.
• The Wizard of Oz – 4K + Blu-ray + Digital – $9.99 Another classic movie, coming it at No. 6 on the AFI 100 list. They just released this new 4K scan and it gets great reviews. I was hoping someone would have it on Black Friday for a good price and Walmart did the best (Best Buy was $23).

I feel like I showed some restraint by not getting the live action Aladdin in 4K for $7.96 despite being a great deal. I had enjoyed the movie, but could wait on that (or watch on Disney+). The prices seemed to go live around 9 AM and I was checked out before 10 AM, so Black Friday was over before 10 in the morning on Thursday. Or so I thought.

When I got home, I was reading people’s posts about their trips to Walmart and they were getting the 4K version of It’s a Wonderful Life (the new, better scan, in 4K) for only $5.96. I had just gotten the older scan on blu-ray for $5.99 without a digital copy from Best Buy, but I could return it. Also somehow Walmart was selling the Mission: Impossible 6-pack for $5.96 whereas I had paid $12.99. So I went back to Walmart a little later to look and was lucky to find both of those on the shelves. So now it was more like noon and I was done. Or so I thought.

There was really one other item I wanted which was the second Lego movie, for only $4 at Target. I had to wait for that one to go on sale and stopped by a Target on the way back from Athens that night. Target was pretty crowded and I had to work around a few people checking out the movie shippers, but really they didn’t have many good deals, so I just picked up the Lego movie without a slipcover. When I got home I read more reports about Walmart, including experiences with the door busting sale. While my movies all came with digital copies, some of the ones in Walmart’s shippers didn’t have them. Plus the number of copies of movies in the shippers was pretty limited, so I think I did pretty well there.

Despite the great deals, I have learned not to open the movies for a few days because sometimes even better sales come along after Black Friday. And really the lesson this year I think was not to order online from Best Buy since they usually have plenty of stock. That would have also saved me from having to return two of the movies I am supposed to get in the mail next Wednesday.