DVD Sales - Snow Kidding
February 18, 2008
There were plenty of new releases this week and five of them managed to squeeze into the top five on the sales chart.
However, the new number one came as a complete surprise as Snow Buddies sold 1.23 million units during the week for sales of $22.29 million. That's almost as much as the rest of the top five combined.
Across the Universe was the best of the rest with 440,000 units sold and $8.64 million in revenue while The Brave One opened in third place with 389,000 / $7.06 million. The Aristocats placed fourth with 291,000 units / $4.94 million, but I suspect a lot of people held off, assuming a Blu-ray edition will be arriving sooner rather than later. Finally, in fifth place was The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford with 213,000 units for opening week sales of $3.75 million.
The only other new release to chart this week was Elizabeth: The Golden Age, which continued its poor showing by taking in $2.69 million from 133,000 units.
As for the Format War... it's over. Blu-ray won the week and improved on last week's numbers with 81% of the market share, but that's not the big news. The big news was Netflix dropping HD DVD on Monday. At least that was the big news for a few hours as it was quickly followed up by Best Buy officially recommending Blu-ray to all of its customers. Which was the big news until Wal-Mart officially announced it too was dropping HD DVD. Which was the big news until the weekend when word leaked out that Toshiba was planning to drop HD DVD, and since they are the only hardware manufacturer out there, that would be the official end of the format. It could be over as early as this time next week, while I would expect a flood of previously HD DVD only releases to come out on Blu-ray by November for the Christmas rush.
Hopefully this will include Serenity. And it better not be just a port of the HD DVD release either, it better be the Special Edition release done for Blu-ray.
Filed under: Video Sales, The Brave One, Across the Universe, Elizabeth: The Golden Age, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford