Alan Smithee

There aren’t many more places for me to buy discs anymore- everything upcoming in the next few months that I want (like The Sparks Brothers) I’ve had to order as likely no stores here will have them.

morriscroy

In a similar niche of audio cds, this is not a recent thing.

For over the past decade, ordering online has been standard for less popular music cds. Especially if the remaining local indie record store(s) do not carry such titles.

Adam Tyner

Aside from Barnes and Noble’s 50% off Criterion sale, I could probably count the number of discs I’ve bought at a physical store in the past 5 years on one hand and have several fingers left over. (I think Aquaman at Target might be the last one? Not counting gifts or a Vinegar Syndrome pop-up.) The closest store with a deep selection of movies I like is Orbit DVD in Asheville, which is over an hour from my house.

orangerunner

It's always in a company's financial best interest to convert their clients to buy the convenient, non-physical version of every product they can.

Coral

Right, but the only thing stopping someone from buying the physical media is themselves.
It's not like consumers can't buy the discs - they just chose not to.

Even on a DVD forum we've seen a dramatic drop in how much physical media is bought. It's only logical that regular movie viewers would bail on physical media even more.
The studios are only following consumer demand.

Josh Z

As a SteelBook collector, I still regularly shop at Best Buy, though I typically order online for curbside or in-store pickup. That's a better option than shipping, as Best Buy will ship SteelBooks in padded envelopes or thin cardboard mailers guaranteed to leave them dented or crushed.

I went into the store last week and took a peek around. The physical media section was down to one small, half-empty shelf and a standing display for new releases.

At the moment, Barnes & Noble has the best Blu-ray selection in the area, though I think that's mostly a factor of their terrible prices meaning that they still have lots of old, lingering stock that nobody bought. I only go there during Criterion sales.

milo bloom

Yeah, I wonder if they'd ever consider doing other sales for the rest of their stock. I always like going in there but walk out empty handed quite often.

slop101

I buy (mostly newly released) vinyl, and my tastes aren't particularly mainstream, so even though I have a few good local record shops around 99% of my vinyl has to be bought online - that's been the case for almost ten years now.

BuckNaked2k

BuckNaked2k

milo bloom

Spooky stuff driving sales for October?

Adam Tyner

Hocus Pocus was consistently one of the top sellers, with movies/specials like The Nightmare Before Christmas, Beetlejuice, the Addams Family double feature, It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, American Psycho, etc. also in the top 10/top 20.

But really, it's just big blockbusters hitting home video. The first two weeks of the month were led by F9, with Black Widow and Space Jam: A New Legacy also doing really strong numbers. The last week of the month was overwhelmingly driven by The Suicide Squad.

Alan Smithee

People actually bought Space Jam? They must not have gotten to see it beforehand. I normally buy sequels just for completeness' sake but New Legacy was REALLY bad.

milo bloom

Despite my love of Looney Tunes I somehow missed the original, so when the new one was out I watched both back to back and the first one had some amusing moments and I thought surely they would learn from their mistakes and the second one would be better but it was just bad.

Josh-da-man

I think that sales are only up from last year because last year was a pandemic dead zone when nothing was being released. Even though we have quite a few green arrows, the actual numbers still aren't good.

TheBang

One bright spot is that with new releases back in the mix, Blu-ray's sales share has gone back up into the 40+% territory where it was before the pandemic. Earlier this year, with the lack of new releases, it was consistently in the mid-to-low 30's.

BuckNaked2k

15 years after its release, and we're talking about Blu-ray in the 40% territory.

Coral

And that's in terms of revenue, it would probably be closer to 25% if we're talking about unit sales since BDs generally costs more than DVDs.

BuckNaked2k

True. Here's just the Top 50:

TheBang

That's weird, that graph is the opposite. That actually puts the Blu-ray unit share (32.4% + 12.9% = 45.3%) as a higher proportion than the previous revenue share graph (42%).

Edit: Sorry, I guess that's because that graph is just the top 50. Still, the majority of sales is in the new releases, not catalog, so the unit share percentages are not going to change that much.

orangerunner

I just received the Canadian Wal-Mart Black Friday flyer in the mail and noticed the only physical discs featured were the DVD versions of Black Widow, F9, Venom, Hobbs & Shaw etc. No ads for Blu-ray or 4K discs.

PhantomStranger

I was surprised Walmart even included media in their Black Friday line-up at all. Walmart isn't making much more than a token effort selling movies these days.

Coral

I saw the Walmart ad as well and had a laugh.

Their Black Friday pricing for the movies is $6.98 and $13.94 for DVDs. Black Friday... DVDs... for those prices. Meanwhile BDs should have a regular price of $5.

orangerunner

Just a few years ago I recall Best Buy Canada selling 20th Century Fox titles like Last of the Mohicans, Butch Cassidy, Fantastic Four, Day After Tomorrow etc. being 2 for $8. I think those days might be behind us as the sales volume has dropped significantly plus the price of shipping and raw materials such as poly-carbonate plastic has gone way up.

BuckNaked2k