December 12th, 2016
This is a strange week on the home market. We have one of the biggest domestic hits of the year, Suicide Squad, but it is one of the worst movies I’ve seen this year. (Granted, I’ve done fewer reviews this year and skipped a lot of terrible looking movies, like Independence Day: Resurgence, Warcraft, Gods of Egypt, Allegiant... Ben Hur, The Huntsman, The Legend of Tarzan. I could keep going. Wow! It was a bad year for $100 million movies.) After Suicide Squad, the next biggest release according to Amazon is the Chicago Cubs 2016 World Series Collector's Edition Blu-ray. That’s a huge drop in sales. As far as quality is concerned, I have to give a shout out to that World Series Blu-ray. Real fans want full games and this one provides them. On the other hand, I personally find baseball boring to watch. Unfortunately, there’s no one release that stands out as an obvious Pick of the Week, but instead we have a lot of releases that are close, but wouldn’t be close enough during a good week. The Twilight Zone: The Complete Series on Blu-ray is the best, assuming you didn’t grab the individual seasons when they came out.
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November 21st, 2016
This is the Tuesday before Black Friday / Cyber Monday. It is the last chance for a home market release to come out before one of the most important shopping weekends of the year. However, it also means the new releases coming out have to compete with massive sales and they will tend to get lost in the crowd. Overall, this is a negative for the new releases, which explains why there are not many big titles. The biggest release of the week is Kubo and the Two Strings, which is also one of the best. If you don’t have any of the Laika films, then the Box Set is easily worth picking up. However, I’m giving the Pick of the Week title to Mystery Science Theater 3000: XXXVII, because I’m a huge fanboy.
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