Freddy Krueger may be the man of your dreams, but for collectors who preordered Amazon’s latest A Nightmare on Elm Street 4K Steelbook collection, actually getting the thing has become something of a nightmare.
Amazon opened preorders for a new run of the highly sought-after A Nightmare on Elm Street 7-Film Steelbook Library Case on July 15, giving fans who missed the original release another shot at owning the elaborate collection at its $154.99 retail price. The preorder quickly attracted attention from horror and physical media collectors, particularly after copies of the previous edition had climbed to several times their original price on the secondary market.
There was just one problem. The September 15 release date has come and gone, and for many Amazon customers, their Steelbooks haven’t arrived.
More than a week later, collectors who placed orders when the set went up for preorder are still comparing notes online as they try to figure out when — or in some cases whether — Amazon will fulfill their orders. A lengthy discussion on Reddit’s r/4kbluray community is filled with customers reporting similar experiences: orders originally scheduled for September 15 suddenly delayed, requests from Amazon to confirm that customers still want the item, and order pages subsequently changing to “Order Received” with no estimated delivery date.
Several customers in the thread say they contacted Amazon customer service only to receive conflicting explanations. Others have started receiving more encouraging updates. Some Amazon customers now report revised delivery dates toward the end of September, while a handful of copies appear to finally be making their way into collectors’ hands. That suggests this may be a fulfillment delay rather than a wholesale cancellation of the July preorders, but Amazon has offered little clarity about why so many orders missed the advertised date.
Making the situation stranger, Amazon’s product page continues to list September 15, 2026 as the release date.
The July restock was a big deal for Nightmare on Elm Street collectors. Warner Bros.’ seven-film 4K set packages the original series — from Wes Craven’s 1984 A Nightmare on Elm Street through 1994’s Wes Craven’s New Nightmare — in individual Steelbooks housed inside a Steelbook Library Case. When the new run appeared on Amazon in July, collectors who had been unwilling to pay inflated resale prices finally had another opportunity to grab one at retail.
And they weren’t exactly casual reservations. Reddit posts from July 15 are filled with collectors celebrating that they had managed to secure orders after missing the previous release. The Amazon listing disappeared again shortly thereafter, leaving customers with little opportunity to simply buy the collection somewhere else once their September orders failed to ship.
For now, canceling an Amazon preorder would seem particularly risky for anyone who still wants the set. With orders beginning to move for at least some customers, giving up a place in line could mean losing the $154.99 preorder altogether and heading back to the secondary market.
So if your July 15 Amazon preorder is still sitting there without a shipping date, you’re definitely not alone. The good news is that copies finally appear to be trickling out. The bad news is that more than a week after release day, plenty of Freddy fans are still stuck stuck in this bad dream.
