Meet the Browns led all new releases on its way to capturing the number one spot on this week's sales chart. However, its opening week sales of $8.75 million from 474,000 units were not strong to say the least and were behind the $10.64 million in sales generated by Vantage Point. It is important to note that the latter film sold only 407,000 units and only earned more thanks to a higher per unit price. Last week's number one film, 10,000 B.C., fell to third place with just 2563,000 units and $4.99 million in sales for the week for totals of 1.16 million units and $20.52 million. Meanwhile, The Spiderwick Chronicles just missed 1 million units in total after selling 191,000 units. After two weeks of release, the film has sold 936,000 units and generated $16.62 million in revenue. The final film in the top five was Drillbit Taylor with 155,000 units / $2.89 million. It is hard to be enthusiastic about that result.

There were two other new releases to chart this week, the best of which was The Closer - Season 3, which generated $1.02 million in sales from 39,000 units. On the other hand, Get Smart's Bruce and Lloyd Out of Control sold just over 30,000 units, and generated just $453,000 in revenue.

On a side note, Batman Begins returned to the charts in 16th place with 34,000 units sold for sales of $285,000. And this is ahead of next week's numbers for its Blu-ray release.

Speaking of Blu-ray, total sales for the week were down more than 11% to $7.86 million in total sales. That's just 6.1% of total home market sales. However, Blu-ray doesn't have a huge catalogue of older titles and is a lot more susceptible to the fluctuations at the top. And since there are only two big Blu-ray releases this summer, Batman Begins - Blu-ray and Best of Both Worlds - Blu-ray, there's not much chance of massive returns until the fall.

- C.S.Strowbridge

Date posted: 2008-07-15