DarkHandOfSigourneyWeaver
Thanks for the updates. I think Wall-E’s still doing quite well, especially considering we’re in the middle of a worldwide recession right now (the top story on the front page of the LA Times today was about the troubles the studios will have this coming year). 10.1 million units so far isn’t too shabby. It beat Iron Man, and only Dark Knight will surpass it this year.
thedriveintheatre: Even Ponyo seems happy about it…
Week #6: 602,000 sales.
The Dark Knight blasted its way back to number one with an enormous haul, and may be set to sell more dvd’s than any other in years. Our little yellow turtle has cemented his place as the #2 dvd of the year. But sales will drop precipitously now. Perhaps Eagle Eye or Pinapple Express will keep the Batman out of first place starting next week with their release.
Week #7: 290,000 sales, now up to about 10.8M copies sold. The steep drop was typical of the post Xmas drop seen by other titles. Batman has been dethroned. Now we are still seeing holiday sales. The holiday is OVER now, only gift cards, end of the month pay and some students still out of school in various places will keep sales well above 100,000 units for the next 2 weeks. Then will come the Academy announcements, the only thing that’s going to really affect sales. I doubt the Golden Globe animation award yesterday will do diddely doo, it just didn’t make the front page of my local newspapers.
Week #8: 116,000 sales. Many major titles fell steeply this week. The wind is now out of the sales for Wall-E. It even fell off the display of the top 40 rentals at my supermarket. Poor Wall-E…
Week #9 94,000 sales. Actually our movie is falling in overall sales, as some readjustments are being made to the charts. Same things happened to Kung Fu Panda. Wall-E is now 3M units behind the Rat. So maybe that Disney operating officer at the convention had better numbers than we have access too.
Wall-E finished as the #2 dvd of the year, well ahead of Iron Man, but almost 3M behind Batman. The website I am tracking says that Wall-E has 9.45M sales so far, but that’s just the same as a whole month ago. So the readjustment of the actual(?) numbers has hurt our little friend.
Alright! Wall-E being the number 2 DVD of the year is great! Go Wall-E!!!
the-numbers.com/movies/2008/WALE-DVD.php
Anyone knows how these numbers are compiled? WALL-E reportedly sold 6.2 million 1st week and now only has 3.3 on the chart? It went from nearly 10 million down to 7 million because of these adjustments(?). How come it can be so staggeringly different if the new number is true? You couldn’t blow the number twice as big and adjust it later like that… 
Read above, it happened to KFP too. I have been watching these deflating numbers the past 2 weeks, and its been jaw dropping. This is my first year monitoring this. It’s the end of the season and sure is weird. It dropped another 2M units just this past few days. I feel like making some telephone calls, we need an explanation.
A few weeks ago, 36 films had passed the 2M units mark, now it’s only 32 (59 last year). The sales really look pale compared to a year ago. Wall-E has now dropped to 4th on the 2008 list, behind even KFP of all movies…! (Although it also says that as of this week it has sold 7k more copies than KFP) Remember the quote I lifted from the PixarBlog site, that a chief operating exec at Disney claimed dvd sales this year were soft and that Wall-E was in the “underperforming” category. Amazing! or at least it seemed at the time. The typical top 10 dvd last year sold 11M units, this year it’s 7M. That’s a drop far larger than the theatrical drop, which varied at years end from nothing to about 5% or so, most of which can be explained by the absence of the $300-400M Potter movie, in an overall take somewhat over $9 billion.
Disney reported today that its profits were down by 1/3. They said it would be the worst downturn in their lifetime and pointed especially to dvd sales and the ‘other’ options people have regarding them, meaning renting. They said that dvd’s were an aging medium.
Looking at these numbers has been the 3rd bad thing to happen in just a week: no Best Picture nom, the Annie massacre, and now the dvd fiasco.
Edit: Well, now they are saying that Alvin and the Chipmunks has passed Wall-E up on 2008 overall sales. This shoves our friend back to #5 for the year. How that can be I don’t know, the chipmunks even passed KFP. It was a Xmas film last year and the dvd was released in Spring, so how can there be all these readjustments? Chart tampering! Anyways, our friend keeps on selling and has passed up the #3 and #4 dvd in 2008+2009 sales:
Week #12: 85,000 sales.
Week #13: 79,000
Week #14: 66,000, still holding around #17 on the list, for week ending Feb. 22nd
and KFP is now off the list. So the Annie tidal wave may have done nothing $wise.
Another reason to doubt all these “disappointing sales” rumors, WALL-E just popped BACK to #1 on the DVD sales charts for the week of March 1st. That means WALL-E was #1 on the charts months after its release.
Yes, perhaps in sales to these large companies, but not really in actual sales by the consumer. Those real sales will take many weeks to be realized. (Edit: probably wrong! based on new information) Still, Madagascar2 and High School Musical3 aren’t creampuffs. I would have expected HSM3 to have sold 500,000-750K units this past week, it sold 1.5M on week#1. If all this is true, then Wall•E might have ‘sold’ well over this, possibly 1-1.5M units.
hollywoodreporter.com/hr/con … 1457f90cc0
Here is the actual Nielsen VideoScan list:
homemediamagazine.com/top-se … ended-3109
I had posted about this about 3 weeks ago at the walleforum.com, and predicted this would happen:
walleforum.com/index.php?topic=1518.30 near bottom of this 3rd page
In fact, it did happen to Ratatouille last year at this same exact time, first of March, about 300,000 copies, and was mostly some sort of batch sale. Sure, there are post-Oscar sales, just as Slumdog is the #2? movie in the land, and near the top in Britain. It’s easy to see Xmas related sales on the charts, but not so ez to detect Oscar sales with these large lots. If you notice, 4 of the 9 dvd’s came from Warner, 2 from Dreamworks, 1 Pixar etc. Most of these were big summer theatrical releases and may have been overproduced for the seasonal dvd release, and fell victim to the worsening recession.
Now comes the big buggaboo. What are they going to do with the rest of those 3M unsold units, which I know is just speculation on our part. The people at Disney knew something was wrong by Dec. 9th with Wall-E sales, calling it “underperforming.” So, my speculation is that if such numbers of unsold copies exist, we may see some sort of special promotion, perhaps repackaging with some other product. Since we noticed the problem, Wall-E has sold about a quarter of a million units plus the unknown # of special sales (hasn’t been reported, but its BIG this week ending March 1st.
Wall-E apparently sold an immense number of dvd’s during the week after the enormously successful Oscar’s ceremony. My source at Target is quoting: 3,100,000 copies moved up until Saturday, Feb. 28th. His single store pushed 700-800 copies and was reordering and restocking box after box every day. There are 5,000 Target stores thruout North America. More about this over on the other forum:
walleforum.com/index.php?topic=3668.0
Edit: but this number was not reflected in this week’s the-numbers.com report, where Wall-E was #4 and sold 211,000 copies. TDK and MM were right behind. So this is the 2nd time we have been either misled or some glitch has occurred. Something is fishy since this week’s total money made came out to about $15 per dvd, which has been Wall-E’s average since Xmas, and Target was selling at 10 bucks. So I don’t think Target’s results were even included. I think I’m gonna talk to some other people about this, such as at Target and Disney, cuz I’m tired of these numbers being off by the millions, bahh.
Edit: 18th week: 45,000 sales, slipping to #23 on the chart, won’t be long now…
Edit: 21st week: still on Top30 chart.
Edit: 25th week: off the chart for a few weeks now, but might come back after Up debuts this summer. This is because nearly all the holiday season movies have had their dvd’s released.
Edit: 27th week: 77,500 sales, moves back onto chart. My local store has sold out of regular Wall-E dvd’s. 28th week: 73,000 and is poised to pass by Iron Man in a few weeks if this keeps Up, regaining the #2 spot for 2008 releases.
That’s great news, DarkHand! Thanks!
Wall-E, as mentioned above, sold 140,000 copies when Up was released in the theaters. Now the first Transformers just pushed over a quarter of a million dvd’s a couple of weeks ago, in tandem with the Transf2 release. T1 was the biggest dvd of 2007: nearly 16M copies now domestically.
Now with UP coming in a few days to the stores, we can expect to see Wall-E have one last basking in the limelight. It’s not part of a franchise film series, but still will get collateral sales.
In honor of the dvd release on Nov. 18 2008, will you be reliving some of the choicest segments? I’ve already started to celebrate, before the Up oeuvre, with ‘The Pixar Story’ for starters. Someone loaned me a ‘Triumph of the Nerds’ 2 hour special about Jobs, Gates and the Silicon Valley, circa 1996. It’s nice to watch the Pixar tale because it’s a happy story with no end in sight. What will you be watching to celebrate? Will you go to a church and light a candle?
Edit in January 2010: well, no one posted anything else, what a bust. Anyway, Wall-E never got back on the top 30 dvd’s during the 2009 holidays, not even for a single week, there was an amazing amount of competition with even The Dark Knight going to #2 during a promotion, but the #3 dvd of 2008, our friend, didn’t even make the chart.