Serenity box office and Firefly DVD sales
According to this website Serenity made a good but still disappointing $3.9 million on opening day. Usually a movie makes 30% of it’s weekend take on Friday, so it will probably make less than $15 million this weekend. That’s still good enough for second place, behind Flightplan, so perhaps it’s only disappointing because I’ve been on the inside of a blogger-based echo chamber of hype.
What surely can’t be described as disappointing are the sales of the Firefly DVD set. As I write this post it’s number three at Amazon, behind only the DVD debut of Cinderella and some Family Guy thing. (That’s an interesting portent, because we all know what happened when Family Guy sold a ton of discs after being cancelled.) Obviously, the movie is driving a whole lot of those DVD sales. Hopefully a solid percentage of newbies are leaving the movie wanting to see more.
I don’t know anything about the licensing agreement between Fox and Universal, perhaps it makes it impossible for the series to return to teevee. But my hope for Serenity is that it does ok, makes a tidy profit, yet doesn’t become a blockbuster. Then, if the DVD sales are good for the next six months, Fox may decide to bring the series back rather than let Universal make a sequel.
Personally, I’d much prefer to see a new Whedon story weekly rather than deal with a movie franchise. It’s gonna suck to wait two or three years between movies to find out what happens.
Update: Well, the box office estimates have Serenity at $10 million for the weekend. Not good, but it’s beating Flightplan on a per-screen basis, so maybe with that and word-of-mouth there won’t be much fall-off this week.
Popularity: 5% [?]
A couple of months ago I noticed Firefly was in Amazon’s best sellers list, and I checked back occassionally. I think the lowest I’ve seen it was at #22, and it broke the top 10 a couple of times. Considering the list is updated hourly, they must be selling a lot.
It was your comments after the movie that made me check Amazon in the first place.
I wish I could find a historical record of the Amazon top 100. Someone, somewhere must be keeping track of this via the Amazon API, but I can’t find them.
I once thought “Why doesn’t Amazon list total number of DVDs sold for its top sellers?” then I figured they probably consider it a trade secret.
Firefly has stayed in the top 80 since the first trailer was released.
http://www.fireflyfans.net/amazon.asp
Thanks, Tony. That’s the kinda thing I’ve been looking for.
It was the high sells of the DVD that made Universal greenlight the movie.