This is very weird as I just placed a brand new DVD into my DVD player and after viewing the movie, I was very surprise to see that my disc was actually pretty scratched up, and I'm 100% sure it wasn't like that before..

has this ever happened to anyone else? Should I try another movie, or you wouldn't recommend it?

I got one scratched by my DVD player because the disc wasn't properly put on the DVD tray yet... I didn't notice it and I closed the tray. =P

What movie was it? Your player may have been trying to keep you from watching it again.

DVD players can scratch discs, sure. If there's foreign matter inside protruding or blocking (you'd be surprised what has ended up inside players, if you have kids), or if the player is vibrating because of a disc not being 100% flat or having an uneven label.

Moving the player with a spinning disc inside could result in circular scratches (happens a lot on the 360). Straight scratches usually happens while the tray is being closed/openened.

A funny story btw, a friend of mine who is using his 360 as a DVD player, was suddenly getting lots of scratched discs. I went to his place to take a look. Turned out his 360 was right next to his new earthshaking 15" subwoofer.

I've noticed that DVD players and CD players in which you "feed in" the disc (as opposed to dropping it in a tray) tends to leave small marks on the discs from when you pull it out after it slides out like 1/2 of the disc.

I'd open that sucker up and see what's going on. I'm sure you have a scratched copy of NKOTB X-Mas CD or something that you don;t care getting scratched up. I can;t imagine what would be scratching it up though, unless, like others have said, it was not seated properly when inserted. I know I;ve done that before. Very odd though.

I had a dvd drive in my pc create an array of circular scratches around the middle of the disc. I'm not sure what caused the scratches, never spent any time to figure it out. Since those are so cheap, I just got rid of the drive and replaced it.

The New Kids on the Block Christmas CD has been out of print for years- don't risk trashing it!

I've seen laserdiscs get circular scratches in the middle after being played a lot- I have several that were played all day in stores that had this happen, and the first DTS laserdisc I ever got ended up the same way after I kept playing the DTS trailer at the beginning over and over. I was able to fix these with CD scratch polish.

No and I have at the moment 4 different dvd players not counting pc drives. And 2 players that are long since gone.

This happen to me once. It happened on a somewhat scratched disc (I'm not sure anymore what the disc was since that's years ago... probably a burned CD).