DVD Sales: Not the Finest Week on the Home Market

July 20, 2010

It has been a full month since we had any real activity on the sales chart, and this is starting to take its toll on the overall numbers. New releases were almost nonexistent at the box office, but one of them, Brooklyn's Finest, still managed to top the sales chart this week, albeit with just 297,000 units sold and $4.63 million in consumer spending at retail. Percy & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief was close behind with 275,000 units sold and in fact led the way with $5.44 million in spending. Its totals after two weeks of release were 1.10 million units and $19.43 million in sales. Hot Tub Time Machine held on better than most DVDs do, adding 199,000 units during its second weekend of release to its total of 631,000 units / $11.17 million. The Book of Eli climbed to fourth place with 157,000 units / $3.34 million for the week and 1.41 million units / $31.23 million after nearly a month of release. Alice in Wonderland has spent six weeks in the top five and sold 3.55 million units, including 105,000 units this past week. It probably won't reach the top five for the year, but the studio should be very happy with its results so far.

The only other new releases this week were both limited releases with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo placing tenth with 68,000 units / $1.07 million and A Single Man earning 15th place with 52,000 units / $940,000 in sales.

It was arguably the worst week for Blu-ray sales all year as they crashed to just 26% to $12.8 million, which was down 21% from last year. This is the second worst week-to-week decline in the format's history, but there are some mitigating factors. For instance, DVD sales were down 25%, so compared to DVD, Blu-ray managed 10% of total sales and 19% of the top 20 comparison, which isn't bad. Secondly, compared to last year, the box office power of the new releases to chart were terrible. In fact, if you take all three new releases that charted this week and added up their box office numbers, they still won't be able to top the box office result of last year's chart topping film. The best selling Blu-ray of the week was Brooklyn's Finest at about 100,000 units, while The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo opened with 50,000 units. I'm actually more impressed by the latter's number since it is not the typical High Definition release and it sold almost 28% of its total units in High Definition.

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Filed under: Video Sales, Män som hatar kvinnor, Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, Brooklyn's Finest, A Single Man, Hot Tub Time Machine, Alice in Wonderland, The Book of Eli