June 23rd, 2020
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This could be the worst week for DVD / Blu-ray releases I’ve seen, outside of when a Tuesday falls on January 1st. The reason for this is simple, Trolls World Tour is hitting VOD. Or to be more precise, it is transitioning from premium VOD to electronic sale through VOD. You can now buy it for the same price you could rent it before. This film is easily the biggest release of the lockdown and it will easily be the biggest DVD / Blu-ray release of the summer. Unless there’s a monster TV-on-DVD release this fall, it will be the biggest release until the pandemic fully subsides. And, since there are parts of the world that are hitting daily records for new cases, including many parts of the United States, that could be a few more months at the very least. Fortunately, while there are only three releases on the highlights list this week, two of them are Pick-of-the-Week contenders. Murder by Decree and Portrait of a Lady on Fire are both absolutely worth picking up, but the latter wins out for Pick of the Week thanks to its Criterion Collection Blu-ray release.
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February 15th, 2016
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There's no major release this week. I was tempted to give Spectre the Pick of the Week honor, but the screener arrived too late to get the review done over the weekend. None of the big releases are worth the Pick of the Week title. There are a number of smaller releases that are worth considering for Pick of the Week, including The Kid, which tops the list.
On a side note, this week's list is a little shorter than I would have liked, because the people who run Amazon are morons. They've changed the New Releases page, again, making it even harder to find a list of new releases for the week. Additionally, there are some films, like Black Mass, that weren't on the list of releases for this week before the changes were made. I understand why physical stores reorganize every once and a while, because if people have to walk to the store to find something, they are more likely to buy something else on a whim. However, these people physically walked to the store, so if they don't buy what they came for, it will be a wasted effort. On the other hand, people go to Amazon by clicking a button. Making it harder to find new releases for that week won't make it more likely they will buy something else. It means they are more likely to not buy anything at all.
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October 20th, 2015
It is a shallow week on the home market. The number one release is Jurassic World, which is one of the biggest hits of all time. The second biggest release according to Amazon.com is the Back to the Future Box Set. There's mostly filler by the time you get to the second page of new releases. As for the best release on this week's list, I'm going old school. ... Really, really old school. Diary of a Lost Girl is 86 years old, but the Blu-ray is Pick of the Week.
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October 21st, 2014
Like last week, it is not a very busy week on the home market. However, unlike last week, there are not a lot of prime releases. The second to last DVD / Blu-ray release for Mad Men tops the list. Well, it is the second to last release, until the Full Season Megaset comes out. The biggest theatrical release is The Purge: Anarchy, which was a huge hit, given its budget, but not a monster hit. As for the Pick of the Week contenders, it's Mad Men and Snowpiercer on DVD or Blu-ray. In the end I had to flip a coin to decide. I came up heads. Then I realized I should probably decide which movie is heads before I flipped the coin. Let's try that again. Snowpiercer is the Pick of the Week.
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October 21st, 2013
This week on the home market is... well... it's short. Last week, according to Amazon.com, there were 459 new releases or reissues. This week there are 161. Fortunately, there are a few releases of note, including The Conjuring, which pulled in more than $300 million worldwide on a production budget of just $20 million. Fortunately, it really deserved this success and the DVD or Blu-ray Combo Pack are contenders for Pick of the Week. Other contenders include Before Midnight on DVD or Blu-ray Combo Pack and The Way Way Back on DVD or Blu-ray Combo Pack. In the end, it was literally a coin toss and The Conjuring won.
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