Dark Knight an all-time bestseller at retailers

Title broke sales records at Best Buy and Virgin

By Susanne Ault -- Video Business, 1/6/2009

JAN. 6 | The Dark Knight is proving a bright spot during an overall gloomy holiday shopping season, as it has broken sales records at Best Buy and Virgin Megastores, among other retailers.

Best Buy is reporting that the first-week DVD sales of Warner Home Video’s Dec. 9 release were the best in the chain’s history. Dark Knight’srun topped Best Buy’s previous first-week record holder, Warner’s 2003 release The Matrix Reloaded.

“It was the most units we ever sold in a week,” Best Buy spokesman Brian Lucas said. “It’s a case where our core customer demographic was really drawn to the title.”

Lucas added that through December, the title has shown “strong legs” and continued to perform well at Best Buy.

Virgin Megastores has enjoyed record-breaking Blu-ray strength with Dark Knight. In its five weeks on shelves, Dark Knight has sold more units than any other Blu-ray title released to date. Runner-up Iron Man has sold about 70% of Dark Knight’s numbers as of early January.

The retailer also was boosted by the fact that Dark Knight’s premium-priced special edition version has sold nearly as many units as the film’s relatively inexpensive single-disc SKU.

Among other retailers, DeepDiscount.com notes that Dark Knight marks the first time the standard DVD and Blu-ray versions of a film have respectively held the overall Nos. 1 and 2 DVD weekly ranking slots for four weeks straight.

“I haven’t seen that before—with the two [different] formats being that high up and together for so long,” said David Barker, VP of e-commerce marketing at DeepDiscount parent Infinity Resources.

InMotion Entertainment believes that Dark Knight’s sales pace will keep it ranked within its Top 20 sales through the first quarter. The title has a good shot of trumping InMotion’s current all-time DVD bestsellers, Warner 2007 releases The Departed and 300.

“It has the potential of being our all-time bestseller,” said Steve Torr, InMotion director of software purchasing and rental services.

Retailers believe that Dark Knight hit an especially sweet spot with consumers, who were otherwise trying to reign in spending in December.

“Dark Knight was definitely one of our biggest DVDs ever,” Virgin senior product manager Chris Anstey said. “The DVD had three things going for it: box office gold, overwhelming critical acclaim for the late Heath Ledger and its holiday release date. No DVD title has had such an immediate impact that this has had.”

Warner earlier announced that Dark Knight sold more than 13.5 million units worldwide in its first week on shelves, including 1.7 million Blu-ray copies. The studio has not provided updated figures since then.

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