Daily Variety, September 23, 2004
HEADLINE: \'STAR POWERS\'
BYLINE: SCOTT HETTRICK
HIGHLIGHT:
Fox DVD, videogame draw $ 115 mil
BODY:
The force is richer than ever.
Consumers around the world spent more than $ 115 million on the "Star Wars Trilogy" DVD and the LucasArts "Star Wars Battlefront" videogame combined on Tuesday, according to 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment.
Though Fox would not break that number down, it\'s believed that about 90% of the spending was for the DVD worldwide, with a big chunk of that coming from the U.S.
Most of the $ 115 mil goes to Lucas\' companies, which publish and distribute the videogame and which pays only a distrib fee to Fox for distribution of all the home video versions of the trilogy movies except for "Star Wars."
Fox splits revs with Lucas on the home video of the original film.
European countries led by the U.K, France and Germany, contributed a disproportionate share of the revenue in American dollars, given the exchange rate that favors particularly France and the U.K.
While the $ 115 million is huge by any measure or comparison, it\'s difficult to put the unprecedented claim into perspective for several reasons:
Although the number is growing, few DVDs are released simultaneously worldwide;
Even fewer videogames related to a movie are released exactly the same day;
There are no global franchises of the magnitude of "Star Wars" to compare (the five films thus far have generated more than $ 3.4 billion in box office grosses worldwide --- not adjusted for inflation), particularly with the packaged release of three original films in a single set.
Because of the high price point for the set of three films --- $ 69.98 suggested retail price and a rough average consumer purchase price in the U.S. of $ 40-$ 45, as compared to about $ 15-$ 18 for recent big seller "The Passion of the Christ" (also from Fox), the "Star Wars Trilogy" will not come close to setting any single-day or single-week or all-time sales records in terms of the number of copies purchased.
But if consumers purchase somewhere close to 8 million copies in the U.S., a realistic projection, that could translate to nearly $ 350 million in consumer spending, which could rank "The Star Wars Trilogy" as one of the top moneymaking DVDs of the year --- along with "Passion," "Spider-Man 2," and "Shrek 2" --- and among the top 15 or so of all time, according to Variety sister publication DVD Exclusive.
A combined 125 million copies of all the various videocassette and laserdisc versions of the original three "Star Wars" films and all formats of the two most recent movies in the series, "The Phantom Menace" and "Attack of the Clones," have been purchased by consumers, according to Fox. The studio has previously reported more than 70 million of those copies were videocassettes of the original three movies sold worldwide since the mid-1980s.
The spending on the DVD and videogame will grow rapidly over the next few days as the videogame makes its debut later this week overseas and the DVD gets released for the first time in major countries such as Japan, Australia, and Mexico.
