No Time To Die, Wonder Woman 1984, Tenet and Peter Rabbit 2 lead the UK’s best-sellers on home entertainment formats in 2021.
Amidst the plethora of end of year chart round-ups comes news from the British Association for Screen Entertainment (BASE) as to the UK’s biggest selling film titles on download, DVD, Blu-ray and 4K. And it turns out that James Bond had a pretty good Christmas.
Notwithstanding the fact that the film No Time To Die only got its disc release five days before Christmas, it’s been crowned the biggest title of 2021, notching up 1.148m sales. That number covers digital purchases as well as discs, but at a time when physical media sales continue to decline, No Time To Die posted the biggest week one disc sale numbers since 2017. We got the chance to experience the magic behind the stunts in this and previous Bonds last month.
Numbers, incidentally, have been compiled by the Official Charts Company.
Downloads have long overtaken the sales of DVDs, Blu-rays and 4K discs, and the numbers released by BASE cement that trend. Furthermore, it reveals that 16 million households in the UK now have access to a streaming subscription. The launch of Disney+ in the UK did no harm there.
Interestingly, when it comes to actually buying a film to keep, most of us still just about prefer physical media. There were 17.7 million digital buy and keep transactions last year, against 21.1 million disc sales. It’s a closing gap, but overall the industry has posted a 13.3% increase in revenues.
The films that helped power this? When it comes to digital paid-for rental, Wonder Woman 1984 topped the chart last year, ahead of Tenet and – remarkably – 2001’s Harry Potter & The Philosopher’s Stone.
Peter Rabbit 2 was the top-selling children’s title in the UK, with No Time To Die the number one disc overall. Other big sellers included Black Widow, Fast & Furious 9, Godzilla Vs Kong and Zack Snyder’s Justice League.
Inevitably it was a disrupted year, with cinemas closed in most of the UK for half of it. That’s helped fuel a boom in home entertainment spending, and it’ll be a challenge for it to hold up to the same levels in 2022 if – touch wood – we get something akin to a calmer year.
Conversely, there’s a greater number of high profile films arriving this year, and the small matter of Spider-Man: No Way Home’s home formats release expected around Easter. Who knows? Just as he did at the cinema, Spidey might just outdo James Bond all over again…
