Last year, the Black Friday sales on blu-rays were spread out over the month of November, but were mostly not great. This year, that happened again, but it was even worse because Best Buy doesn’t even make ads anymore, so you just had to wait and see what they put on sale. For the most part, they started a sale on November 1 and then another one on November 15, and kept the prices the same for most of the month. Their selection and prices were not great, with a few $7.99 4K discs, but mostly $9.99 and more. They finally released a few blu-rays at $5.99, but pretty sparse. I had about $40 in rewards credits at Best Buy, so I wound up picking up a few 4K blu-rays including Ad Astra1, Jojo Rabbit2, and Gattaca3 for $9.99 each and then picked up A Quiet Place4 for $7.99. I wasn’t crazy about Jojo and have never seen A Quiet Place, but both had slipcovers and digital copies which is a nice plus. Gattaca is a favorite that I never got on blu-ray and Ad Astra was a neat movie too. I thought about getting Tenet for $9.99, but decided I didn’t like it enough to upgrade my blu-ray that I had gotten cheap from Redbox. On Black Friday they had Shazam5 blu-ray for $5.99. That was a fun movie, so I went ahead and got that for $1.07 after using a $5 reward. Only 5 movies from Best Buy is pretty low for me.
The Walmart sale started November 12, but prices were not very good, with a lot of $12.96 4k blu-rays. I did end up getting The Hobbit6 trilogy on blu-ray for $5.96 to go with my Lord of the Rings trilogy I got there last year. They had The Matrix trilogy for the same price, but I didn’t see it at the two stores I visited and already have the first on on 4k anyway.
I ended up buying more stuff from sales at gruv.com, which is an online store run by Universal Pictures. They have been having pretty good sales, offering free shipping, and usually have a 20% off promo code that makes their prices even better. I bought blu-rays of Parenthood7 and Out of Sight8 early in the month. Then they had a nice 4K sale around Black Friday and I picked up the first three Jason Bourne movies9, 10, 11 for $8 each, plus The Sting12 and Vertigo13 for $10 each. They had a pretty good deal on Shrek: The Ultimate Collection14 which included all 4 Shrek movies on blu-ray and digital, plus Puss in Boots, and a live action presentation of Shrek: The Musical for about $15 for the box.
Barnes and Noble ran their usual 50% off Criterion Collection sale all month. They have finally started releasing 4K movies and started out with what many consider the greatest movie of all time, Citizen Kane, in 4K. Generally I don’t feel like 4K does much for old movies, especially black and white movies, but Citizen Kane is a classic and I hadn’t upgraded my DVD copy yet. Even with half off, Criterion discs are expensive and Citizen Kane15 was $30, but I found a way to get $20 off, though to get the best deal, I had to add Criterion’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High16 for $20 more. So $30 for those two was still pretty good. Then it turned out that the blu-ray copy of Citizen Kane was flawed and Criterion is doing a replacement of that disc in the 3-disc set. You break the disc in half, email them a picture of the broken disc and they are supposed to send you a replacement later in December. I wonder how many people will break their 4K disc in half?
Dollar Tree had a wave of DVD’s and blu-rays late in the month, but they have had mostly obscure low-budget movies lately, so it has been hard finding anything worth even a dollar (rising to $1.25 next year). I found one store with stock from the new wave of titles and all I got was the Lego Ninjago17 movie in spanish language packaging (still has the original English soundtrack).