Once again Black Friday is now on Thursday, right after Thanksgiving dinner. So I got to eat a delicious dinner and then drive to Best Buy. This wasn’t a spur of the moment decision, but the result of a year’s worth of patience and research. I had been buying a lot of Blu-rays this year, so there wasn’t much more that I really wanted, plus I don’t feel like this has been a particularly strong year for movie releases, so I really only wanted about five titles.
Similar to last year, Best Buy’s ad generally had the best deals and their Black Friday ad came out in early November. Walmart had a decent ad, but it didn’t say what all they had for sale, instead saying “50 titles at this price,” but only showing 8 titles, leaving you no clue on the other 42. Target had a few okay deals. Frys didn’t really even try this year, with only a small selection of 4K movies for $1 more than Best Buy’s price. I came up with this list of Best Buy picks (the last numbers are the Rotten Tomato and Metacritic scores):
- Avengers Infinity War, $6.99, 84/68
- Black Panther, $6.99, 97/88
- Blade Runner 2049, $5.99, 87/81
- Manchester by the Sea, $3.99, 95/96
- Paddington 2, $5.99, 100/88
Honestly I wasn’t that crazy about Infinity War, but the $6.99 price is as good or better than I can do at Disney Movie Club and since I will see the second part of the movie when it comes out in May, it would be good to be able to watch it over again before that. Of those five, the most critically acclaimed at Rotten Tomatoes is Paddington 2, with a 100% rating, the only movie I haven’t seen yet. There were other movies I was considering like the animated feature Book of Life (82/67) at only $3.99, a movie about Mexico’s Day of the Dead tradition which came out before Pixar’s better rated movie about that called Coco (97/81). I was also considering 2016 Best Picture winner La La Land, I mean Moonlight (98/99!). I never saw Moonlight and am pretty sure I wouldn’t like it, but it was only $3.99 and has amazing review scores. I had seen and liked the movies Phantom Thread (91/90) and Lady Bird (99/94), but they were $7.99 each on Blu-ray so they were maybes. Also it would be good to get some 4K titles and Best Buy had some for only $7.99. At that price point Deepwater Horizon (84/68) and Patriots Day (80/69) looked like the best choices. The French-made sci-fi movie Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, which was a critical and commercial bomb (48/51), but also visually spectacular, was another possibility just to show off what the TV could do. I would rather get Black Panther or Blade Runner 2049 in 4K, but those were $15.99 and I don’t think my TV is good enough to show much difference, so not worth paying twice as much.
Before Black Friday ever happens, Best Buy offers their rewards members early access. Since getting a Best Buy Visa card last year, I have used it enough to earn Elite Plus status which allowed me to get their Black Friday deals online on Sunday at 1 AM before Thanksgiving. I figured I could get most everything early and have it shipped to me instead of “fighting the crowds” at Best Buy Thursday night (unless you are there right at the opening these crowds do not usually exist), but instead you end up staying up late on Saturday night because they do run out of titles in the first hour. If I got all five of my movie picks that would cost about $30 so I went ahead and exchanged most of my rewards points in for a $20 gift certificate. Unfortunately, the advance sale was really lame, so hardly any of the movies I wanted were at the Black Friday price, just Blade Runner 2049 and Black Panther and those together would not be over $20, so I couldn’t use my certificate (should have gotten smaller certificates). However, because it was early Sunday morning, that week’s Best Buy ad came out and they had a couple of good titles now available at $3.99 that were not part of the Black Friday ad, so I included Madagascar and How to Train Your Dragon for $3.99 each (Madagascar 3 was available at the same price, but I hadn’t liked it as much while the second one was my favorite and not on sale). Well, somehow it escaped me that those 4 movies together would be over $20 and I could use the certificate, so I wound up just getting Blade Runner and the two cartoons and not using the certificate. One concern I had was whether I would get slipcovers on the movies or not and I knew that none of the store copies of Blade Runner had slipcovers, but some of the Black Panther copies did, so it was better to wait on Black Panther (usually slipcovers are only available on the first printing and later are left off, but it varies, with Disney tending to keep them longer than other studios).
Best Buy (and everyone else) puts out cardboard stands in the aisles to hold all of the Black Friday movies. These are called shippers. On Wednesday, someone posted pictures of the opened shippers at their Best Buy. The good thing was there were lots of copies of the Marvel movies and they had slipcovers. In fact, so did all of my choices except Blade Runner. And Book of Life looked like it had a slip, so now I was thinking I should get that one.
Thanksgiving morning people online started going to Walmart to check out movie prices and selection and reporting back. Officially Walmart’s Black Friday doesn’t start until 6 PM on Thanksgiving, but they are open all day and the movie prices drop first thing in the morning. Last year I was able to get Spider-man Homecoming in the morning. They had some 4K movies for $8.96 including Deadpool 2 (which was $14.99 at Best Buy) and disappointingly also had Blade Runner 2049 on 4K at that price, which I would have gotten if I had known (probably shouldn’t have opened the movie when I got it in the mail on Wednesday so I could have returned it, but I wasn’t expecting that). I went to Walmart to pick up a copy of Deadpool 2, but they didn’t have any copies and I couldn’t even find the movie shippers (turns out they were in the dairy section) and it wouldn’t matter anyway since they would be wrapped up in shrinkwrap until 6 PM.
I spent the afternoon and early evening at Jeb and Kathy’s, getting a great meal and getting to meet Clementine and see Mary’s brothers for the first time since the wedding. Then afterwards I stopped by Best Buy, which was busy but no real crowds, as usual. They had plenty of movies left and I was able to get all of my main picks with slipcovers. And Book of Life. And Moonlight even had a slipcover, so I got it. I saw Deepwater Horizon, but now I wanted to get Deadpool 2 instead, so I left it. Six movies. And by Thursday I had earned some more rewards points, so I was able to get another $5 certificate. My six movies after using $25 in certificates were only $7.56. I was in and out in about 10 minutes.
After leaving Best Buy around 8 PM, I drove back to Walmart. Their shippers were open, but pretty picked over and it doesn’t look like they had that many 4K movies in the first place. Once again I didn’t see any copies of Deadpool 2. I drove to another Walmart and found a few copies on the shelves, so I went ahead and got that and was all done. It wasn’t even Friday yet. And if you wanted anything from Walmart for Black Friday, you needed to have gotten it on Thursday. After setting out to get five movies, I ended up with ten, which is still two fewer than I got last year, so I think I kept it mostly in control. All of the movies came with digital copies except How to Train Your Dragon, but I was able to buy a digital copy for that one from Vudu for $2. The other wrinkle to all of this was that last year I bought more movies in December than I bought at Black Friday and even more than that in January.
I decided I should go ahead and get Deepwater Horizon in 4K since I don’t have many 4K movies. I was going to order it online but then decided I should just drive up to Best Buy and stop at Target on the way and see if they had Jumanji. Target had a lot of stuff, but not that, which makes sense since they had the best price going on that movie. So that saved me $9. At Best Buy the shippers were pretty picked over, but amazingly they still seemed to have most of what had been on my original list. I picked a good copy of Deepwater Horizon with a slip cover. Then I was looking at some $5 movies and almost bought the original Michael Keaton Batman movie and almost bought the Shrek spin-off Puss in Boots, but I only gave that movie a B. On one of the shippers I found a copy of Madagascar 2! I wasn’t sure what price it would ring up, but it came out to $3.99, so a great deal for a movie I really wanted. But I was in the car before I realized that unlike Madagascar, it didn’t come with a digital copy. So I paid $2 for a digital copy to go with the other movie. So I wound up buying 12 movies.
I thought I was done. In November and July Barnes and Noble has a 50% off sale on Criterion Blu-rays. They are still $20, but they are usually nicely restored acclaimed movies (usually obscure, but not always) with a lot of extras. Mom gave me two for my birthday. I was going to buy a couple more and found out you could go to Staples and get a $50 BN gift card for $42.50, saving 15%. So I did that. Then on Black Friday you could buy a $50 BN gift card with this gift card and get a bonus $10 gift card (the bonus card is only good in January and February, so can’t be used for sale price Criterions). So I did that and my plan was to then buy two Criterions during the July sale (one of the ones I really want is Notorious, which doesn’t come out until January). Then today BN had a sale for 50% off TV seasons, which brought the price of the Twilight Zone box set (the original series) to only $42 on Blu-ray and it has some nice extras, but no digital copy. And you could then apply a 20% Black Friday discount to that, getting it down to $34. For 156 episodes of Twilight Zone, that is less than 25 cents per episode. So I used my gift card to buy it, figuring if I was going to buy it, I should use the gift card first. I still want to get the two Criterions in July. Maybe I should have gotten The Princess Bride by Criterion now since I was ordering anyway, but $25 is the free shipping point, so in July I will need to buy 2 movies to get free shipping (though I could have gotten Notorious from a store).
I wound up putting the rest of the gift card towards the Criterion edition of The Princess Bride (bought that movie on VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, and now Criterion). I ordered online for store pickup so I didn’t have to pay shipping. The day after Christmas, right on schedule, B&N sent me a $10 gift card. They didn’t have good sales at first, but this week they had some 50% off Blu-ray deals, making The Phantom Thread, a movie in my 2017 Top 10 only $11.79. Then they had a 15% discount you could get for giving them your email address, which got it down to about $10, so after sales tax, I got the movie for 64 cents, though I had to drive to Buckhead for store pickup. I still plan on picking up Notorious during the next 50% off sale and early reviews of the restoration are very good.