Guess Who Won the Weekly Race on the Home Market

August 13, 2005

There was a bit of a surprise on top of the Home Market this week as Guess Who led all releases and earned top spot with $8.67 million in DVD rentals, $750,000 in VHS rentals for a $9.42 million total. The film also led the DVD sales chart, but as usual no numbers were released.

Coming in second was the only other newcomer to chart this week, Alexander with just $7.06 million in combined rentals, which is nowhere near enough given the huge production budget and tiny domestic box office. I figured Alexander would have finished first since a lot of people interested in the epic might have been scared off by the bad reviews and waited until the home market. Constantine slipped to third place down 38% to $4.57 million while XXX: State of the Union had a similar performance falling 33% to $4.39 million. Rounding out the top five was the strangely resilient Man of the House, which again had the best week-to-week performance dipping 23% to $4.16 million for a three-week total of $15.91 million.

Overall the total rental market was down, again. Total rentals came in at $137.1 million, down 2.4% from last week and 13.5% from last year. This massive drop pushed 2005 down to 3.5% behind 2004 in the year-to-date race with $4.7 billion.

The top five on the sales chart was nearly the same as the rental charts with Guess Who leading the way followed by Alexander then Constantine and XXX: State of the Union. The only change was The High and the Mighty coming in at fifth place, which is unusual for such an old film to do so well on the sales chart.

There were plenty of other new releases on the sales charts; although new is probably not the best way to describe most of them. Ghostbusters Double Feature Giftset came in seventh and Downfall finished in eighth. The second John Wayne film in the top twenty was Island in the Sky, which just managed the final spot on the charts.

For the third week now Laguna Beach - The Complete First Season remained in first place ahead of The Chappelle Show Season 2, which climbed back into second place. Third place went to Battlestar Galactica: The Miniseries, which came out on December 28th, 2004. The first new release of the week was The Cosby Show The Complete First Season with Entourage - The Complete First Season rounding out the top five.

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Filed under: Constantine, Guess Who, Alexander, XXX: State of the Union, Man of the House, Der Untergang