In case you’ve been too busy binging The Crown or catching up on whatever’s going on with Selena Gomez to notice the calendar ticking down, Christmas is quickly approaching. If you’re unable to order a gift that will arrive in time to wrap and nestle under the tree like it’s been there the whole time, and/or don’t feel like braving Target on Christmas Eve, your best bet is a digital or experiential gift that your loved one can enjoy later in the year. Here are some of our favorites.
MoviePass may be creeping its way back after its pre-pandemic implosion, but for our money a better movie-subscription option is Mubi Go. In addition to Mubi’s collection of streaming titles — mostly art-house and indie fare — the subscription includes one movie ticket per week. The catch is that the movie is chosen by Mubi, so you can only see its selection. But Mubi’s curators have a great eye (as of this writing, the weekly pick is The Boy and the Heron), so it’s more of an opportunity to see good movies in theaters that might otherwise go overlooked. —Emily Palmer Heller
We’ll have to wait until next Christmas for Jordan Peele’s fourth outing, but we can tide ourselves over with these gorgeous screenprinted posters commissioned by Mondo. There’s one for each of Peele’s three previous releases — Get Out, Us, and Nope — available for preorder now. You can print out the image for your giftee with a note that it’s coming their way in mid-March. Bonus points if you wrap it with a Blu-ray of the featured film, but that would require braving the aisles of Best Buy. —EPH
We know you know some A24 stans. The cult-favorite studio offers a subscription service that includes a plethora of goodies: exclusive merch and early access to sales, 10 percent off online purchases, a birthday gift, a membership pin, access to a members-only app with exclusive bonus content and screening tickets, and — for our money, the best perk — a subscription to its quarterly zine. (You can also buy the zines separately if you don’t want to commit.) —EPH
It’s official: Puzzles are cool now. If you’re out of time to grab your favorite puzzler one of our picks, might we suggest signing them up for trendy brand Jiggy’s Puzzle Club. They’ll get a new 500-piece puzzle delivered to them every month, as well as a few other perks like early access to new puzzles. (There’s also a Jiggy Junior Puzzle Club with 100-piece puzzles. Gotta start ’em early!)
“I want to get into On Cinema, but I don’t know where to begin!†If a comedy fan in your life has said this to you, you oughta gift them a subscription to Tim Heidecker’s HEI Network, which comes with every episode of his and Gregg Turkington’s long-running series, all of its spinoffs, and all of the annual Oscars Specials. Also an excellent gift for an existing TimHead or GreggHead or even just someone who loves that good old Tinseltown movie magic. Straight-up worth it for the discounted live Oscars Special ticket alone. —Rebecca Alter
The new revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along has gotten rave reviews, primarily for its excellent casting. Daniel Radcliffe, Jonathan Groff, and Lindsay Mendez have such potent chemistry it’s given us the best Vanity Fair lie-detector test video since Keke Palmer’s “sorry to this man.†For those of us (hint to my family and friends and wealthy benefactors) who have yet to see that chemistry in action, tickets to the musical would make a fantastic gift, especially since its run has been extended through July. —EPH
Best Buy will stop selling DVDs, Blu-rays, and other physical media in 2024; the phaseout is rumored to begin as early as the first quarter of the year. Bleak! Hook up the collectors in your life with a gift card so they can load up on as many discs as they can now before they never can again. (Best Buy has a particularly good collection of exclusive steelbooks.) —Roxana Hadadi
In addition to online play, Nintendo’s upgraded subscription service includes a bunch of quality-of-life upgrades (voice chat, cloud storage), but the biggest draw is the library of classic NES, SNES, Nintendo 64, Sega Genesis, and GameBoy games. It’s a great service to have on Christmas morning when you want to relive your childhood by once again crushing your siblings at Mario Kart 64. —EPH
Capybaras are amazing, and you can help save them with a symbolic adoption in your giftee’s name. In addition to the feeling of goodness, the $60 donation includes an adorable stuffed capybara. You can name it Glen Powell! —EPH
Brian Jordan Alvarez is about to be way too famous, booked, and busy to do Cameos, so get one of his TikTok characters on the line now while you still can! TJ Mack and Marni seem to be popular choices, but if I ever got a personalized holiday greeting from “the Student,†I would faint. —RA