Take a look at some 2015’s coolest Blu-ray and DVD box sets in our Holiday Gift Guide!
Every week, ComingSoon.net takes a look at the top titles arriving on Blu-ray, DVD and Digital HD. With 2015 getting ready to come to an end, we’ve prepared a special Holiday Gift Guide that looks at some of the coolest box sets released this year. If you’re looking for something special to give this holiday season, you’re likely to find more than a few solid choices below. You should also be sure to check out Amazon’s special Thanksgiving Day promotion, which includes quite a few totally free movies such as Divergent and The End of the Tour!
Holiday Gift Guide: Nakatomi Plaza Die Hard Collection
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John McTiernan directed an action movie masterpiece with his 1988 Die Hard. Not only did the film turn Bruce Willis into a Hollywood star, Die Hard itself has became a mandatory Christmastime viewing for many a moviegoer. To celebrate the iconic franchise, 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment recently released all five Die Hard films in a deluxe set that houses the discs inside a scale model of Nakatomi Tower! This release also includes a full disc of bonus features, making it the most comprehensive Die Hard collection to date!
Die Hard isn’t the only Christmastime franchise getting the deluxe treatment. Fox also released this Home Alone collection, which includes all five films in the series. What’s more, it comes with a number of neat little items housed in a paint can. That means that not only can you enjoy the films, you’ve got everything you need to burglar proof your home!
October 21, 2015 is the date that Michael J. Fox’s Marty McFly travels to in Robert Zemeckis’ Back to the Future, Part II and Universal Pictures Home Entertainment celebrated “Back to the Future Day” with this comprehensive set house in light-up lenticular Flux Capacitor packaging! Not only do you get the full film trilogy but, for the first time, the animated “Back to the Future” cartoon comes home as well!
An Amazon exclusive, this massive set includes all six “Phase Two” films from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. That’s Iron Man 3, Thor: The Dark World, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Guardians of the Galaxy, Avengers: Age of Ultron and Ant-Man! Not only does the set include the films on both Blu-ray and Blu-ray 3D, but it comes housed in the Morgan Orb from Guardians of the Galaxy and includes all sorts of neat prop replica ephemera, including a few clues about what’s to come in Captain America: Civil War! Combine this set with the Phase One Collection and you’ve got two thirds of the Infinity Stones!
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Another Amazon exclusive, this set includes many of the most powerful animated films of all time. It offers all eleven feature films directed by the legendary Hayao Miyazaki. In order, that’s Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Castle in the Sky, My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Porco Rosso, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, Ponyo and The Wind Rises! If that’s enough, this set exclusively contains a disc of bonus features that contain Miyazki’s small screen works, including a never before released 1972 animated pilot, “Yuki’s Sun”!
Holiday Gift Guide: Andre Gregory & Wallace Shawn – Three Films and The Apu Trilogy
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Buy at Amazon
The Criterion Collection offers hundreds of great gift options for the cinephile in your life, including these two 2015 box set releases. The former set offers a trio of collaborations between Andre Gregory & Wallace Shawn (including Louis Malle’s My Dinner with Andre and Vanya on 42nd Street as well as Jonathan Demme’s A Master Builder) while the latter brings to Blu-ray to long-awaited Apu Trilogy, which launched the career of Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray. The trilogy follows a young Indian boy, Apu (for whom “The Simpsons” character was named), from his beginnings in a poor village through adulthood.
Holiday Gift Guide: Flicker Alley’s 3-D Rarities
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Flicker Alley continues to impress with its 2015 releases, but this particular disc should stand out for anyone with a 3-D enabled home theater. Commemorating a century of 3-D cinema, the 3-D Rarities set delivers an incredible retrospective of the format. A feast for the eyes, this set showcases a wide variety of fully restored 3-D short films, many of which haven’t been seen in decades! If you’ve been searching for the best possible disc to show off your 3-D setup, look no farther!
Holiday Gift Guide: Lost in Space – The Complete Adventures
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Irwin Allen’s space family Robinson kicks off the list of small screen sets. Fox Home Entertainment does Lost in Space fans proud with this incredibly comprehensive collection. Not only does it include fully-restored versions of every single episode of the 1960s sci-fi series, Lost in Space – The Complete Adventures offers an unbelievable amount of supplemental material, including a cast table read of an unproduced series finale co-written by Will Robinson himself, Bill Mumy!
The Walking Dead continues its series of impressive limited edition sets with this latest fifth season collection. The discs come housed in an original walker (or, in this case, crawler) statue designed by award-winning SFX make-up supervisor and series Executive Producer, Greg Nicotero! This one hits shelves December 1, the same day as the Blu-ray release of the new spinoff series, Fear the Walking Dead!
Holiday Gift Guide: The X-Files Complete Collector’s Set
Every single episode of The X-Files comes to Blu-ray for the first time ever in this massive 55-disc box set, packed with newly created special features. All nine seasons are also available individually, so you’ll be able to adjust your X-Files intake accordingly in preparation for the upcoming series revival on FOX!
This year, HBO upgraded to Blu-ray David Simon’s acclaimed series, The Wire. Although some fans were upset that this new set alters the series’ aspect ratio, the change does little to diminish the power of the five-season story. You can read Simon’s own thoughts about the new set right here. There’s also the just-released complete Boardwalk Empire, bringing to Blu-ray all 56 episode of the true Prohibition Era crime drama produced by Martin Scorsese.
Holiday Gift Guide: Doctor Who: Christmas Specials Gift Set and Sherlock Limited Edition Gift Set
If the BBC is more your style, this year sees the release of both Doctor Who and Sherlock gift sets. The former packages every Christmas special from the modern iteration of the long-running British sci-fi series with a sonic screwdriver replica. The latter set, meanwhile, delivers every single Sherlock episode to date alongside busts of Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman’s Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.
Holiday Gift Guide: Steelbooks
Steelbooks are an increasingly popular way of releasing movies and TV series in collector-friendly packaging and there are quite a few Steelbook lines hitting US shelves this holiday season! Nine different James Bond titles are now available (with rumors suggesting we’ll get the rest of the series in the Steelbook format when SPECTRE comes home next year). There’s also all six Star Wars films in Steelbook form (plus an Amazon exclusive Star Wars: Battlefront steelbook) and, a Walmart exclusive, the appropriately-named Zoolander Blue Steelbook. Rounding out the Steelbook list is the first two seasons of Game of Thrones. Future seasons of the hit HBO series are already planned to arrive in matching cases which can then be lined up to form a spine mural.
Buy at Amazon
Buy at Amazon
Buy at Wal-Mart
Buy at Amazon
Holiday Gift Guide: Mystery Science Theater 3000
Be sure to tune in to Shout! Factory‘s “Turkey Day” MST3K marathon for free episodes streaming straight from the Satellite of Love. If you’re looking for a gift for the MSTie in your life, Shout Factory has quite a few great Mystery Science Theater 3000 sets available on DVD. There’s also a Kickstarter currently running to raise funds to film all-new episodes!
Holiday Gift Guide: Oscilloscope Laboratories’ Circle of Trust
Buy at Oscilloscope
Founded by the late Adam Yauch of Beastie Boys fame, Oscilloscope Laboratories brings to Blu-ray and DVD all sorts of different films. If you’re looking to purchase a gift for a cinephile friend and aren’t sure what he or she already has, Oscilloscope has cool program called the Circle of Trust. For $99, you can sign up to have delivered the next ten Oscilloscope titles as they’re released along with a number of other neat perks. Past releases have included narrative films like Bellflower and documentaries like Exit Through the Gift Shop so, for about $10 a title, you can treat a friend (or yourself) to an ongoing selection of cinematic gems!
