DEG Watched At Home Chart: Hunting for New Entries

June 19, 2020

Sonic the Hedgehog

There were some changes on the DEG Watched at Home chart this week; however, the top film was the same. Sonic the Hedgehog earned first place for the fourth week in a row, taking full advantage of the pause in new movies caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. There are still rumors that Netflix is looking to buy Paramount. Maybe this success is enough to keep Paramount where it is, or perhaps it just increases the asking price.

The Invisible Man remained in second place on the chart. I wonder how well it would have done had there not been a flood of low-budget horror movies to hit theaters this year. Had that market not been saturated, it might have been a $100 million hit at the domestic box office. Or maybe the series of much, much weaker releases helped prime audiences’ desire to see a great horror film.

The first new release available on disc was The Hunt, which landed in fourth place. The film wasn’t able to convert the controversy it generated into ticket sales, but it also came out the week the pandemic really hit the United States, so it never had a real chance at box office success. This result strongly suggests its home market run will be more lucrative.

Birds of Prey slipped a spot to fourth, but it is still going strong on the home market. The film has the highest dollar figure for a 2020 release on our combined DVD / Blu-ray chart so far this year, but it might not stay there for long.

Bad Boys for Life rounded out the top five.

The best “new” release on the chart was Gone with the Wind. Its appearance is in large part due to the reaction to HBO Max pulling the movie from their service while they prepare a video essay explaining the “Yikes!”-level of racism in the movie. That generated enough publicity to get it on this chart. The film is close to four hours long, so I wonder how many people rented it on VOD, but didn’t finish it. The only true new release to chart was Yellowstone: Season Two.

There was a three-way tie for more prolific studio between Universal, Sony, and Disney as each had five releases in the top five. Universal had two in the top five, so it wins the tiebreaker.

- DEG Weekly Watched at Home Chart

Filed under: DEG Watched at Home, Gone with the Wind, Bad Boys For Life, Sonic The Hedgehog, The Invisible Man, The Hunt, Birds of Prey (And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn), Yellowstone