While 2009 was a great year at US cinemas, the news wasn’t quite so good on the home entertainment front, with the result that for the first time since 2002, American cinemas made more money at the box office than was taken by people buying films on DVD and Blu-ray.
Reuters reports that Adams Media Research has released figures that show that with a 10% rise in US cinema takings to $9.87 billion and a 13% drop in movie DVD/Blu-ray sales to $8.73 billion, films in the home took a big hit. However, that’s not the whole story, as the $8.73 billion only accounts for films on DVD/Blu-ray.
When you add in television shows, concert videos and other content, overall it came to a not inconiderable $13 billion worth of discs bought in 2009, which is a drop on last year, but not as as bad as it could have been thanks to the expansion of the Blu-ray format over the year, which accounted for $1.1 billion, about double what it made in 2008.
You can also add in another $8.15 billion from DVD/Blu-ray rentals (which is a slight increase on last year), as well as $1.27 billion spent on rentals through cable and satellite services, and $361 million spent renting/buying movies online, adding up to a grand total of $28.38 billion spent on all forms of films in cinemas and the home by Americans in 2009, slightly down last year’s $28.47 billion.
While the headline figure of cinema overtaking DVD/Blu-ray sales of films for the first time since 2002 sounds rather gloomy, overall the nearly $20 billion made outside the multiplexes is still the financial driving force of the film industry. It should be remembered that before DVD came along, cinema outdid all forms of video (sell-thru and rental) added together, but now it’s home entertainment that makes far more money than anything else.
If you’re wondering why the cinema figure of $9.87 billion is lower than the $10.6 billion box office record we’ve been talking about in recent days, it’s because the former figure doesn’t include the money spent by Canadians at the cinema while the latter does (what’s usually referred to as the domestic gross normally inclues Canada as well as the US).