Source: The Hollywood Reporter & VideoScan
""Pie"" Sky High As DVD Sales Keep Growing
As DVD weekly sales hit a high of nearly 2 million units, Warner Bros.' ""The Matrix,"" the all-time top DVD seller, was displaced as last week's No. 1 DVD sales title by the debut of the not-rated version of Universal's ""American Pie."" Meanwhile, the R-rated version of ""American Pie"" bowed in the No. 6 spot on the DVD sales charts. The not-rated ""American Pie"" includes a raunchy sex scene and features scenes that were edited in the rated version. DVD purchases for the week ending December 26 were up 47 percent to 1,874,834 units from last week's record 1,274,497 units. The previous DVD sales peak, according to the VideoScan data tracking service, was 955,351 units for the week ending Dec. 12 (HR 12/23). Since about 30 percent of DVD retailers do not report sales figures to VideoScan, some industry sources are confident that sales topped the 2 million mark for the week. But the news wasn't all good for the home video industry. While the year-to-date videocassette rental market is up 0.2 percent from 1998 ($8.12 billion vs. $8.10 billion), holiday activity plunged 27.3 percent for the week ending December 26 when compared with the same seven-day period last year.