Shrek
"Shrek" spread the green around the entire video industry last year, racking up retail sales that sailed past "Titanic."
DreamWorks says consumers have spent more than $420 million buying more than 21 million VHS and DVD copies -- it is the bestselling video since all-time bestseller "The Lion King."
In the final weeks of last year, the computer-animated movie padded its record-setting DVD sales, which now stand at 7.9 million domestically and 10 million worldwide.
Consumers have spent more than $51 million renting VHS and DVD copies of "Shrek" so far, according to Video Software Dealers Assn.'s VidTrac, ranking the pic 29th on the rental charts for the year.
Titles with strong sales, particularly family titles, typically do not perform as strongly in rental stores since consumers prefer to buy them.
But consumers chose to rent videos in record numbers last year.
Overall rental industry revenue grew 2.1% last year to climb to $8.42 billion, thanks largely to a 164% increase in the number of DVDs rented and a nearly threefold increase in DVD rental spending to $1.4 billion from $570 million the year before.
That more than offset a $659 million or 8.6% decline in revenue from the rental of videocassettes from a 2.9% decline in the number of copies of VHS tapes rented.
The number of overall videos rented in 2001 (both VHS and DVD) climbed 7.2% to nearly 3 billion – about twice as many as the number of movie theater tickets purchased.
Despite an average rental fee of $2.95, video rental revenue alone once again exceeded record box office revenue of $8.13 billion.
Consumer spending on the purchase of videos is expected to add another $12 billion to $13 billion to that total to bring overall video spending to about $21 billion. Final DVD sales figures will be announced later this week at CES.
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