What is the point of buying a steelbook if you don't care about the actual movie? Investment? Art? There are better ways to invest money, especially since steelbooks might be totally worthless in the future, If you like art, you could buy a few posters or fine art paintings, etc. Most movies just sit on a shelf or inside a media cabinet collecting dust anyways, so there is no real way to display or enjoy them for their "art." You likely only look at them when they arrive in the mail, then they sit on shelves for years untouched.
I'm starting to question why I collect movies, but at the very least, I only buy movies that I like. Sometimes I see beautiful steelbooks for movies I don't like or care about, but never buy them because I don't see any real point or intrinsic value of buying something that will just site there and serve no real purpose, but waste my money.
Different strokes and all that.
I personally bought/still buy steelbooks to form a collection of something ... not as an investment although I hope they will have a value after they've been discontinued greater than when I first bought them.
If I'd been interested in an investment I'd probably have bought gold.
As you may know steelbooks do not have to be lined up in a bookcase where you only see the spines and there are fine display options out there including various wall mountings and frames and if I had a spare wall in my study I'd cover it with steelbooks and that wall would look mighty fine.
In 2008 I set myself the challenge of buying every steelbook released in the UK - and THB it wasn't much of a challenge at the time with only
3 steels released in 2008,
9 in 2009,
22 in 2010 and
29 in 2011. From 2012 the floodgates opened and there were literally hundreds released every year. I kept going full stem until December 2015 when I had a reversal of fortune and was forced by necessity to cut back and from then I only bought a certain number every month.
As a film fan I've never really bought steelbooks to watch the films - although I did buy two copies of each steel for a few years (from the first one SWEENEY TODD in May 2008) one to open and the other to keep sealed - and anyway the films I most enjoy watching are unlikely to get steelbook releases.
I buy films to watch in Amarays and consequently I have way more Amarays than steelbooks.
Posters take up too much space and my walls are already covered with my main collection which has nothing to do with steelbooks or films.
The argument about not buying things that one doesn't use has no meaning to a collector.
In every area of collecting - from fine bone china displayed in a glass-fronted cabinet pieces that will never be used for fear of breakages to the antique postcard collector who is not going to write on the cards and send them in the mail the collector curates, displays and researches his/her field and that it just what he/she has always done.