Erin Brockovitch and The Sixth sense.
Since I got to pick the player, DesertRoomie got to pick the movies. Next trip to the store I got Top Gun and the Leone/Eastwood Dollar trilogy.
Simpsons: Season 1.
The Matrix.
Army of Darkness. I bought it just to see the alternate ending where Ash sleeps through nuclear Armageddon
Genesis: Live at Webley Stadium was the first DVD I bought.
The first DVD I ever watched was The Blair Witch Project.
I got my first DVD player (in my computer, which needed its own PCI card to decode) in March 1998, and I picked up
The Rock
Pulp Fiction
Get Shorty
all three of which have since been rereleased in 2 disc special editions. But hey, I was always a believer in preserving the original aspect ratio, and the thing that most appealed to me about this DVD format wasn’t the 5.1 sound (didn’t get one of those for another year), the higher quality video, or the so-called special features of interactive menus (wow! the screen is animated!), scene selection (ooh look, no more rewinding or playing with the fastforward to get to my favorite screen!) or the trailer (big deal, you can find all of those online anyway), so it was very appealing that finally I’d be able to watch all of my favorite movies in widescreen.
Anyway, to get nostalgic, remember back when those above special features WERE trying to be used as marketing tools? “It isn’t a bare bones disc, you can watch the original trailer!”, “check out the cool menus, and we’ve even taken the time to separate the movie into chapters, and made menus for those!” … actually, my Elephant Man DVD DOESN’T have chapter stops, and it’s the only DVD I know of which doesn’t. I believe Austin Powers was my first DVD that actually had real special features - a commentary track (although they made the awful mistake of completely muting the movie’s audio during it) and deleted scenes. And I’m pretty sure A Bug’s Life was the first 2 disc everything-but-the-kitchen-sink DVD I ever got.
Here’s some more sad, nostalgic memories. Snapper cases…Warner Bros was the last hold out, but back in the 90s, they were just as popular among the studios as the plastic cases which finally took over. They were prettier, but they were also more fragile and didn’t do a very good job protecting the disc, since it was essentially a cardboard box. Flipper discs - not the kind with the special features on the opposite side, but discs which were two sides, each a single layer, and each holding half of the movie. Amadeus and The Right Stuff were two that I owned. I suppose at first studios thought that all of the laserdisc people wouldn’t mind, even though one of the POINTS of DVD was to get rid of everything wrong with laserdisc.
And as everybody who adopted early remembers, waiting for your favorite movies to come out at all. Disney held out until around 2000, and then they decided to release their movies barebones…pardon - release them with the trailer, interactive menus, and scene selections! - AND charge $40 a disc! And not only that, but all of their movies would only be on shelves for 90 days and then go back into the vault for 10 years. I was dumb enough to believe this, and actually bought them all (although with the 40% off at amazon, it was only $24 each)…and The Little Mermaid, The Jungle Book and 101 Dalmations were the only movies that actually took their time getting re-released - I remember specifically that Mulan, Hercules and Peter Pan (which is now on its THIRD release) were back on the market in less than a year! For a long time there was a running list of the AFI top 100 which weren’t released on DVD. King Kong was actually the last one left, and they were holding out until the Peter Jackson remake was out. And of course we all remember the idiotic wait for the Star Wars and Indiana Jones releases. And of course, for the first couple years, it was never a guarantee that a new movie would get a new release at all - often it was VHS only, and only in rental stores, and then the DVD would come along a couple months later.
I, too, got a DVD bundle with my first DVD player. Let’s see, I think it was Lost in Space, US Marshalls, City of Angels, Good Will Hunting, and one other one that I can’t remember, but might have starred Sandra Bullock.
Not really selling the format there, were they?
The first DVDs I bought that I actually wanted to own? Night of the Living Dead, Metropolis, Dr. Strangelove, and (I think) The Big Lebowski.
If we count those I got Wing Commander IV with my DVD-ROM drive. 
First DVD movie I bought was Blade Runner. That would have been either '97 or '98; the point at which DVD’s were still thought of as essentially shrunk down laserdisks.
Remember the Divx platform wars. I’m glad that got nipped in bud fast. And how about the shock and horror that someone would actually dare release a movie to DVD in a pan and scan format? Remember George Lucas saying he’d never release Star Wars on DVD and would instead wait for the next video platform? How about Blockbuster completely dismissing the concept of carrying DVD’s?
In fairness I don’t think anyone was expecting the explosion in the DVD market around 2000 as the prices for the technology plunged…
My first DVD player was (and is) the PS2 I bought on launch day. Best Buy had a special PS2 accessory kit–3rd party remote, 3rd party vertical stand, a couple other things (don’t remember what at this point), and a DVD of The Matrix. The Matrix was a great early way to show off everything a DVD was capable of.
The Matrix was also the final straw before Warner Bros finally dropped the snapper format. I remember there was a HUGE backlash to releasing that movie in a snapper case, to the point that third party empty plastic cases with better artwork were being sold everywhere online.
The first three DVDs I bought, on the same day I got my DVD-Rom for my computer, which turned out to be misaligned and a piece of crap, but anyway… were:
The Matrix, which is an awful DVD of a mediocre movie.
Ghostbusters, which is a pretty good DVD, especially for the time, though it’s a bit clunky nowadays.
Ever After, which is one of my favourite movies, even though it’s a barebones release.
I believe our first DVD was Happy Gilmore, back in 1999. We were among the first in our circle of family and friends to get a DVD player, so EVERYONE who came over had to watch Happy Gilmore. Soon after, we bought Mystery Men and that became the disk that everyone wanted to watch (because everyone had seen Happy Gilmore, but no one had even heard of Mystery Men). Must have watched those two disks a hundred times.
Bonus answer: The first laser disk I ever watched was Forrest Gump. I believe it was on three sides of those enormous, LP-sized disks. TG for DVD.
Season 3 of Futurama. I only got the DVD player because seasons 3 and 4 weren’t released on VHS.
I think I busted my DVD buying cherry on that one.
I was an early adopter. My first DVD player cost around $500, back whenever it was I bought it; 1998 or 1999, can’t remember exactly. Anyway, at the same time as I bought the player, I bought Runaway Train, Scream, and Twister, because I think it was a law that first year that everyone who had a DVD player had to own Twister.
My first DVD was Snatch (the 2-disc edition), when I first got my DVD player as a gift from the judge I clerked for over the summer in 2002. After that I quickly got Gladiator, Dark City, Hard Boiled, and Fight Club (also the 2-disc edition), and that was only the beginning.
I bought a DVD player just so I could buy and watch “Classic Albums: Who’s Next”. Pete talks about the initial failure of “Lifehouse”, and plays a wonderful solo version of "Pure and Easy". The segment with Bob Pridden talking about “Going Mobile” is pretty neat too. He plays back the original tapes, all the while adjusting the volume of the individual tracks. Really cool stuff.
I once read that a survey found that over half of the people who owned any DVD, owned a copy of The Matrix.
It was mid 2001 - possibly around July, because I think it was tax time.
I got a new DVD player, a new TV and the Alien Quadrilogy box set. My DVD player died about 2 years ago and the TV went into the spare room to gather dust when we got our widescreen LCD TV in August last year, but the Alien DVDs still work just as well as the day I got them.
I got my first DVD player in August of 2000 and bought the following three DVD’s with it:
Southpark: Bigger Longer and Uncut
The Matrix
Fight Club (2 disc edition)