The world’s highest grossing movie of all-time, the blockbuster Avatar has now also become the fastest-selling Blu-ray disc of all-time, selling 2.7 million units in just four days.
The previous record holder was the blockbuster The Dark Knight, which has sold 2.5 million discs in 18 months.
Avatar, on DVD and Blu-ray has already sold upwards of 7 million units, putting it on pace to become the best-selling title of the decade.
20th Century Fox, the distributor behind the film says cumulative first day sales were 3.2 million, with 2 million coming from DVD sales and the rest from Blu-ray. In recent memory, the Dark Knight launched with 2.7 million units (2.1 million on DVD) and Twilight: New Moon saw 4 million units sold in its first two days. Avatar’s two-day number was around 5.5 million.
Says James Finn of Fox, via Deadline: “Grocery and drug stores sold more Avatar [2D] in one day than they sold of The Dark Knight during its entire life on shelves. This shows that the audience for the home entertainment release far out weighs the fan boy base. It’s a cultural phenomenon…again. Employees and customers alike are dressing up as Na’vis in stores around the country, and this is a home entertainment release like no other.”
“My sources are telling me that Best Buy has sold twice as many Blu-ray players as they normally do since the biggest movie of all time landed in stores. Mass merchants are estimating that Avatar Blu-ray sales are north of 50%, a remarkable percentage for the format and for the home entertainment category. I’ll have more of a read tomorrow morning, but Avatar [2D] is on track to do for Blu-ray what it did for 3D in theaters.”
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According to a new study performed by Futuresource Consulting, 8 percent of consumers from the UK, France, Germany, and the US admitted to downloading video content such as movies by unauthorized means, usually from file sharing sites and networks.
The study, entitled ‘Living With Digital: Consumer Insights into Entertainment Consumption’, “used a representative sample in each country and provided respondents with a list of legal and illegitimate download sites from which to select.”
France topped the list, with 25 percent of survey takers admitting they pirated video content. The survey took about 625 consumers from each nation.
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ESA CEO Mike Gallagher has spoken out this week about both piracy and DRM in the gaming industry, and GamePolitics has made a nice summary of his remarks.
In regards to piracy:
“Piracy is a scourge. Piracy is theft, plain and simple, of the intellectual property and the creativity and the energy of the investors in this industry and the artists who make the great games. Period. Okay?”
“It’s a problem of such degree that it’s between two and three billion dollars a year that it costs our industry in this country alone. When you look at piracy across all of entertainment, it’s a much bigger number when you put in movies and look what it’s done to the music industry. So, the going-in proposition has to be a recognition that piracy is wrong, it’s illegal and it should be stopped…”
In regards to DRM:
“There are business models that say, ‘You know, we’re going to build our business model around giving it away for free and having the revenue come in in other ways.’ We [in the video game business] do that too. We do that too. But for those companies who go forward, they’re entitled to protect - using DRM - to protect their content. And I realize that it is a subject of some controversy with gamers and consumers because, like other similar types of devices, most often they negatively impact the law-abiding gamer.
“But it’s one of those things that we have to be vigilant about. It’s vitally important to preserve the ecosystem and the jobs in the industry and the next great game. If you don’t make money off of the games that are made now you’re not going to see the ones that come later like you saw at the press briefings already at E3.”
