The year? Sometime during the late 2000s. Best guess is 2007. I was around 5 years old at the time. We went to our local Walmart in a city I don’t wanna say the name of for privacy reasons, and around this time, they still had a “one hour photo” photo lab inside, and I don’t know if they still have one or got rid of it. Probably the latter. Anyways, we go in, and use the photo lab to grab some family pictures from our old abiet at-the-time fairly new camcorder. The pictures are dispensed like normal. But, that’s not all. An employee of the photo lab thanked us for using the photo lab, and as a bonus, handed us a copy of the Robin Williams film “One Hour Photo”, free of charge. Of course, who would pass up on a free film? We took it home with us, and we basically nabbed ourselves a free movie. I don’t think the Walmart employees that were working inside of the photo lab during that day realized at the time that this was a psychological horror film about a guy named Sy working at the photo lab inside of this supermarket called Savmart, one that sounds oddly close and similar to Walmart. So, for using the photo lab to print out some of our family photos, we got “One Hour Photo” for free as a bonus. My memory on this is very broad and vague, but I definitely remember that we used the photo lab sometime during the late 2000s and that we got this film for free for using the photo lab. And guess what? I still have that copy we got all that time ago from Walmart. It’s still sitting on our shelf even after over a decade. The disc is still in pretty good condition, too, and that’s maybe because the disc didn’t see a lot of usage and was treated fairly well. I don’t know if this was just a one-off thing, or maybe a sort-of “promotion” that our local Walmart was doing. I am gonna assume that it was just a one-off thing and that we just got fairly lucky that day. But, if it was a promotion, then I don’t remember hearing anything from Walmart about the film being used as a promotional campaign or anything like that. And I know that some Walmart chains were VERY sensitive about this movie cause it literally takes place in a supermarket that looks very similar and who’s name sounds very similar to Walmart.
That’s all the details that I can remember from this.