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Gibson's "Passion" DVD on Fire
We smell sequel.
Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ sold a whopping 4.1 million copies on DVD and VHS in its first day on store shelves, according to Fox Home Entertainment.
The God, guts and gore movie went on sale Tuesday morning. By midday, it had moved 2.4 million copies--exceeding Fox's projections by 20 percent. The 4.1 million is impressive, especially for an R-rated film; Finding Nemo remains the one-day DVD sales record holder with about 8 million.
Nevertheless, the boffo numbers prompted the editor in chief of the monthly trade magazine DVD Exclusive, Scott Hettrick, to quip to Reuters, "It almost appears there's a strong segment of the market that wants to own this in the same way that they want to own the Bible."
The Latin- and Aramaic-language film has already set box-office records despite the subtitles and fire-and-brimstone subject matter. With $370 million in North American ticket sales, the flick is the third biggest of the year, behind only Spider-Man 2 and Shrek 2, and one of the top 10 highest grossing of all time.
And Fox went into overdrive to make sure the home-video launch did just as well. Information about the DVD release had been sent to more than 260,000 churches nationwide while 6 million households were blitzed with promotional materials.
The move is paying off. Fox says the average consumer is buying multiple copies of the video (1.8 per), even though it contains no bonus material. Hettrick figures the DVD could sell upwards of 18 million copies and generate close to $400 million in revenue. That would put Passion on par with Spider-Man and the Lord of the Rings movies and almost guarantee that Gibson could shoot grass growing and still spark a bidding war for the footage.
Gibson's self-financed Passion project propelled him to the top of Forbes' list of most powerful celebrities; the magazine estimated his earnings at $210 million. The film also earned the moviemaker the ire of critics, who cringed at unrelenting violence, and Jewish groups who complained that Passion promoted anti-Semitism by blaming Jews for Christ's death.
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