The PS5 has a built-in 4K Blu-ray player, which is great news for videophiles who prefer to own physical media. While 4K Blu-rays don’t feel as necessary as their 1080p predecessors thanks to the proliferation of streaming media, they’re still a gorgeous way to enjoy (and keep) your favorite movies.
Sony’s upcoming PS5 4K Movie Essentials Collection will reissue a number of 4K Blu-rays from Sony studios, aimed specifically at gamers. The only trouble is that the movies are fairly expensive — and, by and large, bad.
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The PS5 4K Movie Essentials include:
- Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
- Venom
- Spider-Man: Far From Home
- Baby Driver
- Bad Boys for Life
- Hellboy
- Zombieland: Double Tap
- The Fifth Element
- Underworld
- Bloodshot
- Pineapple Express
Information comes from IGN, which spotted the PS5 4K Movie Essentials up for pre-order on Amazon. There are 11 different choices, and most of them cost $31 apiece. That’s not unreasonable, as 4K Blu-rays go, but it’s still pretty expensive when compared to 4K streaming or 1080p Blu-ray purchases. Furthermore, by my estimation, only four of the movies are worth owning to watch again and again.
If you’ve seen most of these movies, you can see the problem right away: Most of them are disposable critical flops that are maybe — maybe — worth watching once on an airplane. Venom, Hellboy and Bloodshot in particular are not critical darlings, to put it mildly.
There’s some mid-range shrug-worthy fare, too, from Spider-Man: Far From Home, Zombieland: Double Tap, Underworld and Pineapple Express. (I was on the fence about putting Pineapple Express in the “legitimately good” category, but you don’t really get much out of a second viewing.)
Of the films listed, only Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Baby Driver, Bad Boys for Life and The Fifth Element merit their high asking prices. And, to be fair, they’ll probably look excellent on the PS5, which outputs gorgeous images to 4K HDR TVs.
If you do buy one of the movies, you’ll at least have a lot of ways to watch it. Each film in the PS5 4K Movie Essentials collection contains a 4K Blu-ray, a full HD Blu-ray and a digital code, and each film has its own set of extra features as well. Whether that’s worth twice what you’d pay for a 4K streaming copy (or about ten times what you’d pay for a 4K streaming rental), that’s up to you.
It’s not hard to see why Sony thought that these films would appeal to a gamer audience, particularly anything associated with the excellent Spider-Man PS4 game. But at $31 apiece ($27 for Underworld; a whopping $46 for Bad Boys for Life), this offer may be for dedicated film fans only.
