Sony's digital movie gift boxes

[MrChristoph]

I guess Sony's trying to give digital movies a presence at physical retail.

I saw this 12 movie "advent calendar" the other day and it caught my attention. OK, the movies aren't the great (The Emoji Movie, Peter rabbit and Christmas with the Kranks together at last!) and there's not quite enough Christmas in there, but as far as digital moves go it's a decent price (it works out cheaper than rentals, and the same titles would be £73.88 on Rakuten) and I see the appeal of a faux-curated collection of movies.

Then I discover this: the Spider-man: Far From Home "Digital Gifting Box". It's a cardboard (?) box with the digital code inside. I get that the logic's probably to make a digital item presentable as a wrapped gift, but there's a steelbook-style J-card, so they expect people to keep the box as a collector's item/display thing? It's supposed to be a practical thing to re-use? Wouldn't unwrapping it be kinda underwhelming? I know that this isn't so different from paying extra for steelbooks, but at least those actually store something you need to keep and don't use too much unnecessary space. I suppose I find the idea of buying a physically copy without the physical copy, or a giftset without the gift, weird. I wonder if these kinds of releases will become a regular sight.