Blu-ray Sales: Vamps Defeat Tramp
March 1, 2012
The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 1 and Lady and the Tramp switched places on the Blu-ray sales chart. The former rose to first place during its first full week on the home market selling 455,000 units / $10.46 million giving it an early total of 1.24 million units / $28.58 million.
Lady and the Tramp slipped to second place with 219,000 units / $5.53 million for the week and 1.17 million units / $29.24 million after two. The only new release to reach the top five was The Rum Diary, which placed third with 39,000 units / $799,000 giving it a Blu-ray share of 36%. This is excellent, for a drama, but considering how poorly it did on DVD, that's, "Damning it with faith praise." Real Steel rose to fourth place with 35,000 units / $1.04 million for the week and 1.08 million units / $30.29 million after four. Meanwhile, The Lion King returned to the top five with 30,000 units / $686,000 for the week giving it totals of 3.83 million units / $101.14 million. I don't think the studio was expecting to reach the century mark on high definition.
The best of the rest of the new releases was The Lorax, that's the 1972 TV special and not the upcoming movie, obviously. It debuted in 18th place with 14,000 units / $253,000, which is strong for this type of release. Finally, The Dead opened in 20th place with 12,000 units / $179,000, which is strong for a low budget limited release.
There was almost no good news on the Blu-ray market this week, as we saw declines in total units sold both in comparison to last week and last year. Declines from last week were monstrous, down 58% in terms of units and 59% in terms of dollars. DVD sales actually held on better than that. The situation from last year was mixed, down 5% in terms of units, but up 21% in terms of dollars. The overall Blu-ray share was again down hitting 25% in terms of units and 33% in terms of dollars. However, while that's a lot of bad news, the Blu-ray share was still better than last year, and the selection of new Blu-rays coming out this week was particularly weak.
Next week sales should be led by Puss in Boots, which might sell more than the entire market did this week. It would need to sell more than 1.1 million units, which is unlikely, but not totally impossible. Although it didn't come out till Friday, so it is dealing with a shorter week, which is another strike against it. There are a couple other releases that might chart, so overall sales should be a lot stronger than they were this week. Unfortunately, last year's new releases were also strong with two movies selling more than 800,000 DVDs and more than 300,000 Blu-rays.
Filed under: Video Sales, The Lion King, Lady and the Tramp, The Rum Diary, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 1, Real Steel, The Lorax