The single best-selling DVD of all time
Remember the humble DVD? Younger readers might look at the word ‘DVD’ and think it means ‘Defunct Video Device’, and sadly, they very well be correct, but at one point, the Digital Versatile Disc was crucial to the well-oiled Hollywood machine. Flying off the shelves like hotcakes shortly after the release of a major movie, and especially during Christmas, while some seek the comfort of physical media, many others turn to the convenience of streaming services like Netflix.
Indeed, the death of DVD and the rise of streaming services have led Hollywood to totally change its approach to a movie’s release, with physical media previously giving a second oomph to a film’s overall profits. Speaking about this shift in the industry, Matt Damon recently stated: “So what happened was the DVD was a huge part of our business, of our revenue stream”.
Continuing, he added: “Technology has just made that obsolete, and so the movies that we used to make, you could afford to not make all of your money when it played in the theatre because you knew you had the DVD coming behind the release”.
In the modern world where Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Disney+ thrive in a jungle of other streaming services, it’s difficult to forget just how powerful DVDs used to be, generating millions of sales worldwide on a consistent basis. Such is especially clear when looking into the list of the ten best-selling DVDs of all time, with the top spot hauling in over 30million units.
The movie in question is none other than the Pixar flick Finding Nemo from 2003, an underwater odyssey that tells the story of a father trying to find his son after they are dramatically separated from one another. Seen as one of Pixar’s most successful movies, the film took over $900million at the box office and remains the benchmark for underwater animated flicks.
Still holding the top spot of the most-sold DVDs of all time, despite being 20 years old, Finding Nemo sold a total of 38,800,000 discs while also breaking the record for the most amount of DVDs sold in a single day, shifting eight million to the public.
In fact, the whole of the top ten list of the best-selling DVDs of all time is largely dominated by the popular animation house Disney, with 2006’s Cars selling 23,100,000 copies and the first two movies in the Pirates of the Caribbean managing to shift a total of 33million units.
