When a movie doesn’t take off in the theaters, there’s always hope it will find a second life on home video.
With the windows between theatrical and home video growing smaller, there was even a point where studios would only give a movie a bottom line release so they could get it on DVD as quickly as possible because it would make more money in home viewing.
Fight Club went into profit from DVD sales and became a huge buy to own movie. Peter Jackson’s King Kong also made a fortune its first week on DVD, which showed a large portion of its audience preferred to wait until it was out of theaters to finally check it out. After John Carter went in the toilet, you thought it would possibly build an audience on home video, but this hasn’t happened, and it remains to be seen if Cloud Atlas could possibly find an audience via secondary markets as well.
So now comes the news that one film that is really doing well in home video is Dredd. As a fan of the comics, I was especially looking forward to the big screen version of Dredd, and while it didn’t do bang up business in theaters, it’s now doing huge biz on DVD, Blu-ry etc. How big?
According to GiantFreakinRobot, Dredd has already moved a whopping 650,000 copies so far. These sales have also put it at #1 on the DVD, Blu-Ray and digital download charts. This should help bring a hell of a lot more money to the pile, because Dredd only pulled in $32.8 million in world-wide theatrical money.
As a home entertainment executive from Lionsgate told IGN, “Dredd’s chart topping performance demonstrates the breadth of the home entertainment audience for this exciting, high caliber film as well as underscoring our ability to monetize theatrical titles across all home entertainment platforms through the highest packaged, VOD and digital conversion rates in the industry.We’re also pleased that a film released on 3D Blu-ray was able to top the sales charts, a clear reflection of how quality films in the up and coming format can find their audience.”
It’s especially nice to see that Judge Dredd is finally catching on. He was a great comic character, he wasn’t done right in the Stallone version, and the new model Dredd delivered a hardcore, R-rated action film that didn’t wuss out to try and gain a more mainstream audience.
Several other geek sites are also hoping this will result in more Dredd movies in the future. Now that someone finally got Dredd right, it would indeed be great to see him back for more.
