I’ve written about Black Friday movie shopping many times in the past. During that time Black Friday changed from Friday to Thursday night to Thursday morning and then the entire month of November. This year it is now a week before Thanksgiving and it is essentially over. What makes it more complicated is that while a few stores still create advertising circulars with all of their deals, Best Buy has completely stopped doing that and the deals just sort of show up and disappear without warning.
The entire month of November has always been when Barnes & Noble runs a 50% off sale on all Criterion movies. Criterion blu-rays in this sale are usually $20, but now they are finally also releasing 4k movies which are usually $25. I had enough points at Sony Rewards to redeem a $25 Barnes & Noble gift card, so I just had to pick what I wanted . . . and couldn’t really find anything. Wall-E, has a Criterion edition coming out on 4k at the end of the month, the first time Disney has done a Criterion release, but Disney usually includes a lot of nice extras with their movies and I already had Wall-E on blu-ray. With the gift card I could get one 4k movie for free, but it seemed like it would be better to get two movies for $25. In the end I picked a couple of older Criterion blu-ray releases, Five Easy Pieces1 and The Uninvited2 and only had to pay about $13.
Target beat Best Buy by a day, starting a sale on November 6. The best thing from that sale was Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness3 in 4k which came out this year and was $10. If I bought it from the Disney Movie Club on blu-ray, it would cost at least $8, so this way I get it now on 4k for only $2 more. I wasn’t crazy about the movie, only giving it a B, but I have a lot of Marvel movies and it is the kind of thing that looks its best in 4k.
Some people said there would be two sales this year at Best Buy, the first on November 7 and the next on November 14. But in the wee hours of November 7 when Best Buy changes the prices, they put everything from both weeks on sale. By the time I got up they had fixed it, but the week 1 prices were still good, so I picked up Dune4 (A-) in 4k for $9.99 less a $5 reward certificate. A couple of days later a $10 reward certificate from Best Buy showed up from buying a new phone in October, so I picked two movies for $7.99 minus the certificate: The French Dispatch5 (A) and the 4k of A Quiet Place II6, which I haven’t seen, but last year I got the first movie on 4k (and haven’t watched it yet), so they will match. They had the original Top Gun in 4k at $5.99 during the glitch (an amazing price for a 4k movie), but it had gone back up to $7.99 by the time I got up, so I thought I would wait on it.
One of the 4k movies on sale at Best Buy for $9.99 was The Shawshank Redemption7 A-, but Gruv had it for the same price and they have a 20% off coupon and free shipping, so I got that from them. $7.99 is a really great price for a movie I really liked and it arrived with an undamaged slipcover as a nice bonus.
Wal-mart’s sale started on November 16, but was mostly DVD’s and then most 4k’s at $12.96, which is a little steep, but people were all excited about Everything Everywhere All at Once8 in 4k with exclusive artwork consisting of pictures of googly eyes on the cover and it was only $9.96. I had seen that movie at the theaters and gave it a B+, so I didn’t feel like I needed to buy it, but quantities were really limited so I went to Wal-mart to see if I could snag a copy before they were gone. They had 3 copies, so I got one.
For the Week 2 Best Buy sale I actually stayed up until 1 AM for the Best Buy prices to change on the 14th, so I could at least get Top Gun and instead it had gone up to $21.99. In fact just about everything that had been on sale for Week 1 reverted to its normal price and none of the Week 2 stuff was effective yet. This is the problem when there is no ad, you don’t know for sure what is going to happen when. After some more rumors and waiting, the Week 2 prices actually became effective today, November 17, but Top Gun9 only dropped to $7.99. I figured that was as good as it was going to get so I spent my last $5 certificate on it. I had also considered The Northman 4k for $9.99, but user reviews weren’t nearly as glowing as critical reviews, so I think I should watch it first. Another intriguing possibility was the complete That 70’s Show series on blu-ray for only $19.99 at Best Buy. I liked that show when it first came out and that is a great deal for a complete series (8 seasons, 200 episodes), but I don’t know if I would ever watch any of it. Poltergeist, which I’ve never seen also had a $9.99 4k, but, again, I feel like I should watch it first and then might never need to watch it again.
On the way to Best Buy to pick up Top Gun I stopped at a nearby Dollar Tree. I hadn’t been having any luck finding movies other people were reporting lately, but that store had copies of Ocean’s 810 and Selma11. I really liked Selma (A) and was hoping to find it. I have never seen Ocean’s 8, but it meets my requirement for a blind buy by getting a 60 or more on Metacritic (61). I had both of those movies on digital already, but they also came with digital copies that I will give away.
Later: On Saturday I was ordering something from Amazon and I noticed that the 4k of The Big Lebowski12 was only $5.99, a great price for a 4k even though I didn’t care for the movie when I saw it (C-). Maybe in higher resolution and knowing more about what to expect, I can enjoy it.
On Sunday Target started a Buy Two Get One Free sale on movies, but not before raising a lot of their prices again. They left a few prices in place, but they have very few movies in store and it isn’t easy putting together a $35 order to get free shipping. One problem is this wasn’t a real strong year for movies. So about all I could find was a 4k of Lightyear (B+) for $15, which would go to $10 if I could find two other $15 movies. I could get this year’s Thor movie, also $15 for 4k, but I would rather not since I only gave it a B-. And there was really nothing else in stock in that price range that I would want.
On Monday, when I thought I was done, Target lowered the price on Lightyear13 and Thor: Love and Thunder14, both in 4k, to $8.61 each and they were still eligible for Buy 2 Get 1 Free! So I needed to pick a third item somewhere in that price range. And it needed to be in stock, which made it much harder. I picked A Charlie Brown Christmas at first, for $7.99, but realized that is only 25 minutes and I already have it on digital. Even for free, that seemed like a waste. Eventually I found No Time to Die15 for $9.99 on blu-ray. At least that is a full-length movie and, while I only gave it a B, I have the rest of the Daniel Craig Bond movies on digital already, so it gives me a complete set (although No Time to Die‘s digital copy only redeemed at iTunes, whereas I have the rest of the digital movies on Vudu).
By the time Black Friday itself rolled around, there were no new sales and a lot of stuff was out of stock or had even gone back up in price. Amazon matched Target’s Buy 2 Get 1 free on titles that were in stock at Target, but that list was constantly changing and hard to do searches on. Also sometimes instead of doing Buy 2 Get 1, they would offer a coupon on a single title to basically take a third off of the price. They did this for Lightyear, but only after I had already bought it at target. I would have been better off not getting the other 2 titles I had to buy at Target to get the discount. I could have easily gone without buying Everything Everywhere All at Once for $10 and Dr. Strange 2 for $10, but I didn’t want to come away from what was looking like a lackluster Black Friday empty handed. The stuff at Best Buy could have been a little cheaper, but by using rewards certificates, the net prices were unbeatable. Lightyear, Top Gun, Dune, Shawshank and The French Dispatch were all solid purchases of movies I liked. The three Disney movies all come with rewards points that I can use to get posters or more movies (enough for one and a half posters maybe). And No Time to Die came with 1200 Universal points, which will let me pick a free digital movie from them (Big Lebowski should get 500 points, or half a digital movie).