♪ I Would Spend Anything for a Film I Love… But I Won’t Spend That ♪

[Marwood]

$75 for one movie! Is this what physical media has come to in 2025?

Just out of curiosity, what movie are you referring to?

[sabbath]

The Deadly Spawn 4K from Synapse. This thread started there.

[MichaelB]

I'm making a loss on an upcoming commentary commission because of the eye-watering cost of books that I needed for research* - one of which was long-OOP and I could only find a signed copy. Which I didn't care two hoots about, but it was that or nothing, and I didn't fancy nothing, but I've now spent more than my fee.

(*Anyone who says "everything's on the internet now" gets the hollowest of laughs from me, as that could hardly be more untrue.)

[fdm]

Shortly after getting the Criterion bug, I primarily went the ebay route to acquire the first five or six Criterion dvds that had already gone out of print…

(Before the fakes started to appear.)

[Matt]

I spent $100 on the Criterion laserdiscs of Halloween and Boogie Nights when they were new. $70 on Breaking the Waves. I was young with a well-paying job for the first time and had no concept of money.

On the other hand, I got the Salò DVD when it came out and then flipped it for $300 when it went out of print.

[Lowry_Sam]

I'm done with DHL customer service and haven't been able to manage how to complain to Amazon.fr (my order was divided into multiple shipments and there doesn't seem to be a way to select an individual item for return/problems as one can on the US site), so at this point I think I'll just take it up with my card, which is a shame because it was a sale price & now 30 euros more (which I had never seen it so low & as it's been available for a while, not likely to drop again before it goes oop).

The Carlotta box of J'accuse has 2 blu-rays, 6 dvds & 3 books (all French I imagine, but it does mention English subtitles for the films).
Here's a list of the contents:

disques 1 & 2
j'accuse (1938)
disques 3 4 & 5
j'accuse (1919)
disques 6
j'accuse version magirama (1956)
disques 7
la fin du monde(1931)
disques 8
les gaz mortels (1916)

+ le scénario original de 1937
+le scénario original de 1917
+ abel gance
le visionnaire contrarié
inédit !!!

I decided to splurge on it in part because L'Inhumaine had been sitting in my Amazon watchlist without ever going down & apparently went oop without me noticing (and copies now listed for $200-1,000), La Roue dvds are also going for something similar (although I think I can hope for an upgrade on that). Silent films are much less likely to get picked up again/restored and they have smaller print runs, so it seems like we'll have to accept shelling out more for the ones we really want.

[Finch]

I'm sorry to hear about your bad experience with DHL, sam. I've ordered many times with Amazon France and never had any issues, both when I still lived in Scotland and now in the US. Hope it gets resolved for you.

[bearcuborg]

I contemplated spending over $150USD on the World Cinema Blu of The Horse Thief before I came to my senses and realized it’s on YouTube

I almost pulled the trigger on that one too.

Getting the best 4k television on the market earlier this year made me spend $90 for the OOP Once Upon a Time in Hollywood UHD collectors edition. Tempted to spend more for The Third Man 4K collectors edition.

[Walter Kurtz]

The most I've spent on a single movie (4-disc set) is $55 and I won't go higher than that. But I have paid more for a single CD.

Just you wait one damn second there buddy. Oh wait, that's longer than you can last. So how the hell did you manage to write two complete sentences?

[hearthesilence]

I've never spent that much on anything partly due to my upbringing - just going to a movie theater was deemed an expensive luxury by my family, and the habit was ingrained into me enough that even when socializing in high school broke that guideline (hanging out on the weekend often meant going to a movie), it was too much to go to an "old" movie when we could rent it at a video store, and we always rented and *ahem* taped anything we liked, we never actually purchased anything. It wasn't until I finished school, got a job and moved away that I discovered repertory houses while making the choice to build a home library, and I never looked back. But I never pay collectors' prices for anything. (It helps when you usually have the opportunity to see something of that value in a theatrical venue here in NYC, though to be fair the cost of living here is ridiculous.)

[MichaelB]

I remember when you had to see every film in a repertory double or triple bill, otherwise you wouldn't get your £2.50's worth.

[hearthesilence]

I remember when you had to see every film in a repertory double or triple bill, otherwise you wouldn't get your £2.50's worth.

That reminds me, sometime around or after college, I found out the kids in my hometown (within the 12 to 14 year range) regularly watched 2 or 3 movies at the local cineplex every time they went because the staff never bothered to check ticket stubs once you were past the entrance into the cinema from the mall. Buying a ticket was more like buying admission into a movie park rather than one solitary film. (I'm pretty sure they'd walk in and out of those movies whenever they felt like it too.)

[BoltzmannBrain]

I'm making a loss on an upcoming commentary commission because of the eye-watering cost of books that I needed for research* - one of which was long-OOP and I could only find a signed copy. Which I didn't care two hoots about, but it was that or nothing, and I didn't fancy nothing, but I've now spent more than my fee.

(*Anyone who says "everything's on the internet now" gets the hollowest of laughs from me, as that could hardly be more untrue.)

Sell the signed book after you've finished with the commentary and maybe end up on the plus side. Even better, sign the book yourself and put the price higher than it was before.

Just you wait one damn second there buddy. Oh wait, that's longer than you can last. So how the hell did you manage to write two complete sentences?

What are you talking about?

[Walter Kurtz]

I'm talking about Boltzmann brains.

"A Boltzmann brain, as a thought experiment in physics, is theorized to exist for an extremely brief duration, potentially only a fraction of a second, before dissolving back into the void."

Thus a joke for - brand new to the forum - physics nerds who name themselves after Boltzmann brains.

[BoltzmannBrain]

Oh yeah, I took the username from Ludwig Boltzmann's idea, it's a weird and funny concept.

[spectre]

Keeping in mind $1 Australian is about US 65 cents on current exchange rates, I went through a list I put together for the second to most recent financial year and found these extravagant one-film-only purchases, including shipping:

$115.75 for Kin-dza-dza! and Riddle of Fire from Vinegar Syndrome (I usually try to bundle VS imports together to save money on shipping, but it's still ridiculously extravagant!)
$62.32 for the Barbarella limited edition Blu-ray from Arrow
$58.24 for War Is Over from Vinegar Syndrome
$54.90 for the Letters from a Dead Man Blu-ray from the German label Ostalgica
$51.53 for the out-of-print Artificial Eye DVD of La Belle Noiseuse: Divertimento from eBay

I suspect these aren't the worst in recent times, but might help to explain why I have no money!

[MichaelB]

Sell the signed book after you've finished with the commentary and maybe end up on the plus side. Even better, sign the book yourself and put the price higher than it was before.

The fact that I was willing to pay <ahem> hundred pounds for a single book does rather suggest that I wanted it anyway!

[Peacock]

I’m surprised you paid so much for the Dovzhenko book Michael, it’s pretty easy to find his book for cheap!

[MichaelB]

I'm not sure I'd dare do a Dovzhenko commentary!

Although many years ago I said I wouldn't touch the three Bs - Bergman, Bresson, Buñuel - and I've ticked two off now.

[domino harvey]

If anyone is looking for the long OOP Eisenstein sound years Criterion box, I’ve noticed the price going way way down as more copies get put up on eBay. I suspect this is in part from people posting copies out of estate sales (something I’ve been encountering a lot in the last year of OOP disc searching/monitoring), but I got a pristine used copy for ~$30 recently (pro-tip: always add any movie you’re interested in to your eBay watchlist, at least half the time I get a significant discount offer within 24 hours from the seller after doing this)

[hearthesilence]

I thought prices would have come down due to newer 2K restorations of those films being freely available in HD (and with English subtitles) on Mosfilm's official YouTube channel, but the extras account for something.

[Drucker]

That set sat for months in a used DVD store near my office (Book Off in NYC) at $100 for months. One day I walked in and they'd dropped it to $50 and I snatched it up. Everybody is price-matching the most absurd prices posted on Amazon and ebay.

[Lowry_Sam]

I went to my PO Box today to pick up my Arrow LE of TGTBTU which showed delivered 2 days ago (Amazon UK) & opened the box from Amazon & it turns out to be the shipment with my big bad J'Accuse box (Amazon FR). I checked my Amazon Account & it was supposedly delivered July 14. Ecstatic to finally get it & glad I hadn't yet taken up the issue with my credit card. It's probably not worth wasting any more time on, but I would love to be able to stick it to the DHL manager who called & told me that all the GPS coordinate data on her end showed it was delivered at my PO on July 14.

Hopefully my "delivered" TGTBTU shows up sooner.

[Colpeper]

Although that was 4 decades ago, factor in inflation and it was actually considerably more. It boggled my mind that anyone could afford to collect laserdiscs in those days. (Of course I was a student living hand to mouth then).

I'm glad your order turned up.

My most expensive purchase was £100 for the OOP Spine 5, THE 400 BLOWS, in 2002. I agreed to visit the seller in person, to pay cash. He asked me whether I had ever collected laserdiscs (I hadn't) and I will never forget the look on his face when he told me that he had.

[Lowry_Sam]

I just splurged for the Potemkine Napoleon box to go wih my J'accuse box. Preorder price on Amazon.fr was 84€ plus CA Tax plus "tariffs". This is the first I've seen a retailer adding additional tariffs in addition to standard sales tax for media. Amazon.fr coupon 10€ off 50 worked on it, so total with shipping came to 106€, which is not much more than I paid to see the Brownlow version w live accompaniment in Oakland 13 years ago. (I did get to see the Coppola version for free when it screened at the university I attended in the 80s however.)