Stock up on Blu-rays and box sets during the annual Barnes & Noble 50% off Criterion Collection sale

4K classics are $24.99 and big director box sets are half off too.

By Stan Horaczek

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If you’ve been saving money for Black Friday, there has been a change of plans. Every year, Barnes & Noble slashes prices on Criterion collection movies and box sets by half. It’s the next best thing to being in the Criterion Closet. Most of the bestselling single-film 4K discs in the Criterion sale are $24.99, the bestselling standard Blu-rays are mostly $19.99, and the big director box sets are half off too. B&N ships orders of $60 or more for free, so three of the $24.99 4K discs clear the bar. The discount doesn’t stack with B&N’s Premium Membership discount, and a few of the most popular new 4K releases are already out of stock online. We checked every price and stock status in this post on Barnes & Noble Wednesday afternoon, November 11.

Top Criterion Collection deals at Barnes & Noble

The Princess Bride 4K Blu-ray: $24.99 (was $49.99)

The Princess Bride 4K Blu-ray $24.99 (was $49.99)

A family movie night pick that holds up for the grown-ups

Princess Bride Criterion Collection Blu-ray

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Plenty of family movies wear thin for the adults in the room by the fifth viewing, but The Princess Bride keeps getting quoted at dinner tables for a reason. The Criterion edition of The Princess Bride is $24.99 at Barnes & Noble, half of its $49.99 list price. B&N lists it as a 4K Ultra HD and Blu-ray combo, so the standard disc covers any player in the house that can’t handle 4K. Rob Reiner’s 1987 fairy tale is a good place to start if you’re building a disc collection for a family that mostly streams.

No Country for Old Men 4K Blu-ray: $24.99 (was $49.99)

No Country for Old Men 4K Blu-ray $24.99 (was $49.99)

The Coens’ Best Picture winner on 4K disc

No Country for Old Men Criterion

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Javier Bardem’s coin-flipping hitman is one of the scariest villains of the century, and the film around him won Best Picture. The No Country for Old Men 4K Blu-ray is $24.99, down from $49.99. Joel and Ethan Coen’s 2007 West Texas chase also stars Josh Brolin as the hunter who stumbles onto $2 million in drug money and Tommy Lee Jones as the sheriff trying to keep up.

Yojimbo/Sanjuro 4K Blu-ray: $39.99 (was $79.99)

Yojimbo/Sanjuro 4K Blu-ray $39.99 (was $79.99)

Two Kurosawa samurai classics for $40

Kurosowa criterion collection

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Akira Kurosawa made Yojimbo in 1961 and followed it with Sanjuro a year later, both starring Toshiro Mifune as the same scruffy, sharp-witted ronin. The Yojimbo/Sanjuro 4K Blu-ray set puts both films on 4K for $39.99, which works out to about $20 per movie. If Yojimbo’s plot sounds familiar, that’s because Sergio Leone borrowed it for A Fistful of Dollars. This set pairs well with the Seven Samurai 4K Blu-ray, which is $29.99.

The Wes Anderson Archive 4K box set: $249.99 (was $499.99)

The Wes Anderson Archive 4K box set $249.99 (was $499.99)

Ten films, 20 discs and more than 25 hours of extras

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This is the splurge pick in the sale, but per film it costs about the same as the single 4K discs and adds a Blu-ray copy of each movie. The Wes Anderson Archive: Ten Films, Twenty-Five Years is $249.99, half of its $499.99 list price, which comes to $25 per film. Criterion says the set includes ten 4K UHD discs in Dolby Vision HDR, ten Blu-rays and more than 25 hours of special features, running from Bottle Rocket through The French Dispatch. Every film in the set has new 4K masters supervised and approved by Anderson, according to Criterion.

Criterion 4K Blu-ray deals from $24.99

The Princess Bride, No Country for Old Men and Yojimbo/Sanjuro are covered above. Most of the bestselling single-film 4K discs are $24.99, including Wall-E and David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. A few older classics, like Citizen Kane, are $29.99. You need a 4K player to watch these discs, and our guide to the best Blu-ray players covers the 4K models worth buying.

Criterion Blu-ray and DVD deals from $14.99

The bestselling standard Blu-rays are mostly $19.99, and they play on any Blu-ray player or game console with a disc drive. The KPop Demon Hunters Blu-ray is $19.99 and the KPop Demon Hunters DVD is $14.99, though its 4K edition is out of stock online. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is also $19.99.

Criterion box set deals from $19.99

The Wes Anderson Archive and Yojimbo/Sanjuro are covered above. Box sets get the same 50 percent cut as single discs, and the big director collections are where the dollar savings add up. The 30-disc Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema set is $149.99, and the Essential Fellini set is $124.99.

 
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Stan Horaczek

Executive editor, gear and reviews

Stan Horaczek is the executive gear editor at Popular Science. He oversees a team of gear-obsessed writers and editors dedicated to finding and featuring the newest, best, and most innovative gadgets on the market and beyond.