August 24th, 2011
Despite six new releases in the top ten on the Blu-ray sales chart this past week, Rio was able to remain on top with 261,000 units / $7.30 million over the week and 1.29 million units / $28.67 million after two.
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August 24th, 2011
New releases were particularly weak this past week, and none of them were able to unseat Rio on the DVD sales chart. It sold an additional 636,000 units and generated $9.53 million more dollars in sales, pushing its running tallies to 2.27 million units and $34.01 million. It is already in six place for 2011 (fifth place if you don't count Despicable Me, which was released in 2010).
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August 16th, 2011
It's a deceptively busy week, as there are several significant releases hitting the home market on Tuesday. However, most of these are wide releases that flopped, to one degree or another. In fact, one of the best selling releases of the week is Jane Eyre, an early success story in limited release. When a limited release could conceivably lead the way in sales... well, that's a sure sign of weakness in the overall market. As for the best release of the week, that would have to go to The Big Lebowski Limited Edition Blu-ray Digibook. The latest season of Dexter would come close, but while the show is great, the releases are not Pick of the Week material.
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August 14th, 2011
This week both The Fox and the Hound and The Fox and the Hound 2 were released on a single Blu-ray. The original film came out in 1981, which is considered by many to be in the low point of Disney's animation history. The follow-up was released direct-to-DVD 25 years later and did acceptable business on the home market, but was not a real hit. (Earlier that year, Bambi 2 was released and it sold three times as many units.) So now that these two films are coming out on Blu-ray, are they worth picking up? Or is this truly a low point best left alone?
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August 9th, 2011
This week's list is highly frustrating for two reasons. Firstly, while there's a pretty big list of first-run releases, many of which had some pre-release buzz, almost none of them matched expectations. Secondly, my internet access kept cutting out, so it took till 4:30 a.m. to get this done, and by the end I was swearing nearly constantly. (Even 15 minutes of the Smooth Jazz Nyan Cat wasn't enough to calm my nerves.) Moving on... There were two main contenders for Pick of the Week, Paul on Blu-ray and Stargate: Atlantis: Complete Series Megaset on Blu-ray. In the end I went with the latter, partially because the screener for the former hasn't shown up yet.
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