Many people were first made aware of the value of some Blu-ray and 4K UHD discs last year when they heard about the price people were paying for Best Buy exclusive steelbook versions of Oppenheimer. Or maybe they saw the Lawrence of Arabia 4K steelbook selling for 5x retail
If you happen to have one of those, you probably already know that it's valuable, but here are some lesser known rare Blu-rays and 4K releases:
I’m sure people here know this, but I just recently went through the effort of pricing a huge collection of DVDs and a smaller collection of Blu-ray’s. Most mainstream releases aren’t even worth the postage it costs to send them. Just in case you were getting excited by the prospect.
Yep. Especially if they're DVDs that have been superseded by Blurays, the DVDs are almost worthless, sadly. For example, I upgraded my Stargate Atlantis set to Bluray and want to rehome my DVDs, but they're barely worth $5 a season at this point (and that's assuming you can find a buyer). Usually I check with family and friends first to see if they want my hand-me-downs.
If you happen to have the full 10 seasons of Friends, you can get around $60 plus shipping and handling on eBay. More if you have Blu-ray. Same for the LotR trilogy. My wife spent over $100 to get the trilogy on 4k, because the DVDs were almost as much.
Yup. As with most collector’s stuff, the rare shit is the stuff that wasn’t mainstream. Everyone owned a copy of your favorite Disney movie, which means there are thousands of copies still in circulation. If you want to get the expensive stuff, you need to be lucky enough to be into the niche shit that later blew up into a cult classic; Low supply, high demand.
This is why the pristine #1 comics of popular comic book characters are so coveted. Characters got introduced all the time, but nobody knew which ones would get popular and which ones would end up fizzling out and fading into obscurity. And the ones that did get popular usually did so well after people (usually kids) had already read their copies of the comic and degraded them. Because kids aren’t good at taking care of delicate things like comic books. So the only grade 10 copies are the ones bought by speculators, who guessed that the character may blow up some day and get popular.
I bought Dogma on Blu-ray soon after purchasing a PS3 and discovering it was a region free disc. Of course, convicted rapist Harvey Weinstein owns the rights personally, which is why there has never been a re-issue of the film.
I had no idea about Oppenheimer - I have the Danish steelbook which is no doubt worth less. I also have the Amazon Infinity Saga collectors edition in 4k which is also apparently somewhat pricey now.