Pirates take over
I am not talking about this blog being taken over by Pirates (even so the amount of Pirates of the Caribbean related posts here could make one think so) nor am I talking about the silver screens around the globe (where Pirates of the Caribbean has been ruling since it opened in May). No I am talking about the sales charts for DVD releases in high definition formats!
As has been widely discussed The Walt Disney Company chose to exclusively support the Blue-Ray DVD format, created under the leadership of Sony, instead of the competing HD-DVD format. In other words: Disney is betting that Blue-Ray will win the competition (other studios are more reluctant to place a bet). On May 22, 2007 Disney finally released the first two movies of the Pirates series, “Pirates of the Caribbean - The Curse of the Black Pearl” and “Pirates of the Caribbean - Dead Man’s Chest”, on Blue-Ray. And according to a press release of the Blue-Ray Association - cited by the German website Digitalfernsehen - the success equals finding a pirate’s treasure…
According to the press release cited on Digitalfernsehen the two Blue-Ray released of Pirates of the Caribbean I and II combined sold three times more copies in the first week than the leading release on the competing HD-DVD format! MovieWeb has some further details (in English) comparing the “combined total of a little less than 47,000 units” sold of the two Pirates installments in the first week with the (if you ask me appropriately meager) combiled 13,900 units sold in the same time of “The Ultimate Matrix Collection” and “The Complete Matrix Trilogy”, which Warner Bros. had released on HD-DVD format on May 22, 2007 to compete with the Pirates.
Sounds like a clear victory for Disney and Blue-Ray in this battle - but then a single battle doesn’t win the whole war. Also considering how disappointed many fans were with Matix III maybe the Matrix wasn’t such a hard title to beat. Plus: it needs to be considered, that the consumers paid out $2 million between these four release but that the “Matrix”-releases as box sets of several movies were considerable higher priced. To be exact: while the single-disc Pirates releases were sold for about $25 in stores, the five-disc “The Ultimate Matrix Collection” according to MovieWeb is listed for $119.99 and “The Complete Matrix Trilogy” (three discs) is listed for $99.99.
Assuming that the real street price would not deviate and considering only the cheaper priced “Matrix”-set this should have resulted in sales worth a little less than $1,390,000 for Warner Bros. compared to only $1,175,000 for Disney. But then at the current stage of the war, where both formats try to get the lead regarding the number of households equipped with a player, the number of copies sold might be more important for the managers… Anyway it sounds like a really nice loot for Disney … I wonder whether the managers at Disney and the Blue-Ray Association already started singing “Yo Ho”?!