Boxed Set

Now pretty much the standard way of selling TV DVDs, the boxed set typically collects a whole season of a television series on numerous DVDs.

Actually, the term 'Boxed Set' is falling out of use in the modern day, since series are rarely sold as separate videos or DVDs any more, so fitting them into a literal 'boxed set' is no longer an option. Instead, they are often kept in single DVD cases and listed as "the complete Xth season/series". Anime series seem to be the only ones that are still released with a few episodes on individual discs. Once all the individual discs have been released only then will the boxed set come out, typically at a substantial savings over the individual discs. For completists, some studios will even sell the empty box on their website. Meaning a hardcore collector will buy the individual discs at a premium, then pay even more money for an empty box.

It should be noted that in the UK there is a growing tendency to sell half-season boxed sets of popular American series such as Lost to discourage people from ordering sets from abroad (and, probably, to get twice as much money out of the punters).

Boxed sets of film series such as the Alien or Back to The Future movies are also popular, particularly around Christmas time.

In the case of TV series, the boxed set may be preceded by Vanilla Editions containing a few DVDs; the boxed set is typically the step between the Vanilla and the Limited Special Collectors' Ultimate Edition.

A new and growing trend for popular TV shows is the release of a "themed" boxed set. These are aimed at the less dedicated fan who isn't willing to part with the cash for a full series, but might be willing to spend enough to see a few episodes featuring their favorite character or theme.

Examples of Boxed Set include:

Anime

• Anime typically only gets released in boxed sets after being released as individual discs of 3-5 episodes (depending on how well the individuals sell, some series take longer to get a boxset than others).
  • Times are changing. Some of the most recent popular series are being released as box sets right from the start. Busou Renkin, Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, Lyrical Nanoha, Marimite and Aria, to name a few.

Film

• DVDs of the Alien movies can be bought as part of the giant, nine-disc, bafflingly-titled Alien Quadrilogy set. The Blu-Ray versions have a six-disc^[1] box called, Alien Anthology.
• The The Lord of the Rings trilogy has the above beat. There exists the Limited Special Collectors' Ultimate Edition 4 disc set for each movie, as well as a boxed set of all three. If you're bad at math, that's an outrageous twelve discs. The extended edition movies features themselves total 11 and a half hours of viewing time. The making-of documentary for the trilogy totals almost 24 hours.
  • Let's not forget the four complete sets of commentary. If you want to get the whole thing, you'll need more than a work week.
  • And then there's the other set, which has the theatre version, the EE version, and a completely different making-of documentary
• Similarly, there are the ten-disk Ultimate Matrix Collection and the three-disk RoboCop Trilogy collection.
• Some popular film series (such as Indiana Jones, Back to The Future, and Star Wars) make their DVD and/or Blu-Ray debuts with their installments packaged together. The movies later become available individually.
• It's been common for some years, particularly in the case of Golden Age of Hollywood stars, to issue collections of their movies in boxed sets. This is often the only way that a fan of a particular star will be able to get ahold of their rarer movies.
• James Bond has these options: four packs with 5 movies each (or a big box with all), the Daniel Craig movies bought apart; a box with all 22; and a metal case with all 22.
• Terry Gilliam once made light of this in a documentary on the Monty Pythons Meaning of Life DVD. He (jokingly) suggested that the Pythons just find new ways of repackaging the same material "to rip the poor sods off."
• The Twentieth Century Fox-produced adaptations of six Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals sometimes get packaged together.
• Turner Classic Movies has sponsored some compilations each containing four movies belonging to a particular genre.
• Twentieth Century Fox took this to insane levels during their 75th anniversary. They released Cavalcade, the winner of the 1933 Best Picture Oscar, on DVD for the first time...but it also comes with 74 of their bestselling movies.

Live Action TV

• The new Doctor Who series is currently being first released as a series of Vanilla Edition DVDs, followed by a boxed set at Christmas time.
  • Old Who episodes tend to be released as single serials (of anywhere between two and ten 25-minute episodes each), but some come in boxed sets of multiple serials. Several "trilogy" boxed sets of consecutive serials are available, as are sets of serials with a common villain (Davros, the Silurians, the Sontarans and the Black Guardian each have one). The only complete seasons available as boxed sets are Season 16 (The Key to Time) and Season 23 (The Trial of a Time Lord), because they were the only ones before the revival to have a season-long arc.
• Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis have all completed seasons out on boxed sets. This troper has all four released seasons of Atlantis. The only way she was able to see the back half of 3 and all of 4, due to going to Basic Training and then assigned to South Korea. Stargate SG-1 released a boxed set of the entire series after cancellation, all ten seasons.
• Babylon 5 is available in a giant boxed set with all five seasons, all six films, Crusade and Lost Tales.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer has "The Chosen" set, of all seven seasons in one giant cube.
  • Buffy has also released Themed sets focusing on individual characters. Such as a Willow and a Spike box set.
  • Angel has a 5-Season Cube also.
• The Equalizer had a "complete season 1" boxed set release recently.
• Star Trek offers boxed sets of every season of every series, as well as a boxed set of the movies.
  • Paramount has started selling box sets on a theme that spans each of the series. Called Fan Collections, some of the inclusions are voted on by fans on the Paramount website. Examples include "Captain's Log" "Borg" and "Alternate Realities".
    • Particularly low hitting of Paramount is to include some of the same episodes on different collections.
    • Deep Space Nine, Next Generation and Voyager got a special actual limited edition boxed set, with every season of the show packed inside a special box. For Voyager it was a Borg Cube, for Deep Space Nine a solid black box with artwork of the station on it, and for Next Generation a silver box with an engraved logo on the top. The were limited to 3000, 4000 and 5000 depending on which series it was.
  • As Paramount released the movies on Blu-Ray to promote the reboot, these box sets became the only way for fans to obtain the odd-numbered movies, which fell victim to the Star Trek Movie Curse.
• Also the Twin Peaks Gold Box. It even has a quote from David Lynch on front saying "This is the ultimate Twin Peaks boxset". The whole series, including the pilot (which was missing from the season 1 DVD), with both the original American and European endings. The bonus material includes many great making of documentaries and also the most interesting part: A Slice Of Lynch, which is David Lynch, Kyle McLachlan, Michael Ontkean and Mädchen Amick reunites to talk about the show. Heck, it even includes Japanese coffee ads and the SNL skit on Twin Peaks. The only thing missing is Fire Walk With Me which they wanted to include at first, but couldn't because of right troubles.
• In a slight aversion, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. isn't available in its individual seasons, only as a Boxed Set - but it's quite a Boxed Set: all four seasons of the show on nearly 40 DVD's, with a disc of extras to accompany each season and two "bonus discs" full of even more extras, all in a cardboard box designed to look like a metal attache case.
• The Phantasm series had a particularly awesome box set, designed like the Sentinel Spheres used by The Tall Man in the films themselves. Its only available in Europe.
• The Twilight Zone had two nine-disc DVD boxsets, each containing a random assortment of episodes. These later became usurped by The Twilight Zone: The Definitive Edition DVDs, which compiled the episodes in broadcast order, dedicating one five-DVD set for each season (except for seasons 1 and 5, which each had an extra disc containing additional bonus features). These later became complemented by box sets under the banner The Twilight Zone: Fan Favorites, each containing five discs recycled from the earliest compilations.

Music

• The Corrs released a 5-CD Boxed Set of all their studio albums in 2011.
• Invoked by name in Barenaked Ladies' song "Box Set".

Western Animation

• This is the most common way for The Simpsons to be released on DVD, with a season box set coming out every year.
• Animated shows like Batman the Animated Series are commonly sold as "volumes" rather than "seasons" because the episodes within are presented in production order, not broadcast order.
• The Real Ghostbusters received a complete series boxset a few months before cheaper, 5-disc "volumes" came out.

1. ↑ Presumably, the higher capacity of Blu-Ray allowed 20th Century Fox to fit the bonus features on fewer discs than before.