zwolanerd

I have been to 24 movies in the theater this year so far. My gut tells me that’s a bit more than normal, but I’d have to look at the spreadsheets to be sure. Regardless, that’s a lot, right? For a guy who’s not getting paid to watch and review them it seems like a lot.

So as you might imagine, I’m always on the lookout for ways to make it cheaper to go to the movies. My main movie-going buddy and I try to go to showings between 4p-6p, as they are $2-3 cheaper than going later in the evening. Sometimes the local theaters are sneaky, though, and a really big movie that comes out will suspiciously not have a showing scheduled during those times. It doesn’t happen often, but it’s irritating when it does. Going to a movie at that time has the side benefit of leaving the rest of your evening free, but that’s not the main motivation.

The other big way I’ve found is to buy Blu-Rays, which doesn’t sound like it makes sense. The week or two before a big movie hits, the studios will package old maybe-related movies with a coupon to go see the new movie. It’s generally in the form of “go online and enter this code and print out a coupon and take it to the theater,” which is a little bit of a hassle, but not much.

This week, Best Buy was advertising several movies with a free coupon to go see The Expendables III next week. One of the Blu-Rays on the list was The Last Stand, a movie I quite enjoyed. I haven’t bought it yet because I’ve been waiting for the right price to come along. The sale price for the BD (I’m officially from here out just going to use the standard “BD” to refer to “Blu-Ray Discs” so I don’t have to type “Blu-Ray Discs” or “”Blu-Ray” any more) was $8, which is great because that meant I was getting it for $4 and getting to see The Expendables III for $4. So after work on Monday I zipped by Best Buy to pick it up.

NOPE.

Turns out all of the movies offering free tickets to The Expendables III were offering it in the form of Fandango tickets. Fandango’s fine and all, but our local theaters are not Fandango-enabled. I’d have to drive to Indianapolis to use the ticket, and a 2-hour round trip kind of cancels out the free-ness of the ticket. I’d gotten a free Fandango ticket for some other movie in the past (I can’t recall what), before I knew that our theaters didn’t take it. I ended up giving the coupon number to a friend in another part of the country, so that worked out okay for him. This time, though, I caught it before buy the BD.

As I dejectedly wandered around the store to if there were any other good deals I might be interested in, my eyes lit on some Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles DVDs, the new Nickelodeon show. I’d seen a few episodes and really liked it – the humor, animation, and stories were pretty good – and had thought about buying the seasons when they were released on disc. (The DVD only has the first 6 episodes of the first season, which I think is weird. Why not just release them in whole seasons?) Lo and behold, these particular packages had free tickets – not for The Expendables III, but for the Ninja Turtles movie I’m planning to see this weekend. Score! The extra benefit is that I’m not specifically buying a ticket to the movie, which I expect won’t be very good. In the process I am getting a DVD of a product I already know to be good. It’s kind of a win-win for me.

 

Tags: TMNT

Written by: Mark