Finding Nemo Seizes Record For Dvd Sales
The Age
Thursday February 26, 2004
A tiny clownfish has beaten Aragorn the ranger and Maximus the gladiator to a new record: fastest selling DVD in Australia's history.
The distributor, Buena Vista Home Entertainment, announced yesterday that since its release on January 16, Finding Nemo has sold 545,000 copies on DVD - topping the figures for Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, Gladiator, The Fast and The Furious and Shrek.
The film, which made $37 million when shown in cinemas last year, has sold four times as many copies on DVD as on video, showing how rapidly DVD players are replacing VCRs.
Since the arrival of the technology in 1998, Australians have bought 4.6 million players. Last year, Australians spent $706 million buying 26.2 million DVDs to play on them - a growth of 77 per cent on the previous year.
But Buena Vista is predicting that the clownfish won't hold the sales record for long. Today it is releasing The Lion King on DVD as a two-disc set. It expects to sell close to a million copies.
The Lion King made $27 million at the cinema in 1994, and has since sold more than 900,000 copies on video. ``The Lion King has been important to a whole generation, and I think a lot of people will be looking to replace their tired videos," said Anne Carragher, a spokeswoman for Buena Vista.
© 2004 The Age
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