‘G.I. Joe’ Rises to the Top

11 Nov, 2009 By: Thomas K. Arnold

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The upward trend in consumer disc purchases continued last week, with Paramount Home Entertainment’s G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra storming into the No. 1 position on the national sales charts with a whopping first-week North American sales tally of 3.8 million discs, 500,000 of them on Blu-ray.

While some of those units wound up in the rental channel, the majority were sold directly to consumers, making G.I. Joe the third-biggest title so far this year in first-week sales, behind Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and Twilight.

G.I. Joe handily trounced the competition on both the Nielsen VideoScan First Alert sales chart and the Nielsen VideoScan Blu-ray Disc sales chart. Sony Pictures’ The Taking of Pelham 123 debuted at No. 2 on the overall sales chart but only sold 38.5% as many copies as G.I. Joe, according to Nielsen VideoScan research. Taking of Pelham also debuted at No. 2 on the Blu-ray Disc chart but sold just 29.6% as many copies as first-ranked Joe.

On Home Media Magazine’s rental chart for the week ending Nov. 8, the two big new theatrical releases also bowed at No. 1 and No. 2, although the disparity wasn’t as great. Taking of Pelham, which earned $65.5 million in U.S. theaters, generated 78.4% as much rental action as G.I. Joe, with a domestic box office gross of $150.2 million.

20th Century Fox’s Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, the previous week’s top seller and renter, slipped to No. 3 on both the sales and the rental chart. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, the previous week’s top Blu-ray Disc seller, finished in third place on the Blu-ray chart.

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