What’s in a title?

By Scott Hettrick -- Video Business, 1/20/2006

JAN. 20 | Obvious home video bright spots in 2005 were the $342 million spent on The Incredibles, $60 million spent on the second season of Chappelle’s Show and $78 million on DVD premiere Family Guy Presents Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story.

Laudable triumphs every one.

Disney’s The Incredibles almost matched the 2004 home video revenue for Shrek 2, which grossed nearly twice as much at the box office.

Paramount’s Chappelle sold more than 2 million copies in a year that every other TV DVD had trouble getting to 1 million units.

And with Stewie, Fox pulled off an industry first, supplanting Disney as the studio with the top DVD premiere movie of the year.

What Disney sacrificed in the top-seller slot it made up for in volume, with four of the Top 5 titles and five of the Top 10, generating more than $200 million in spending on its DVD premieres.

And two of DreamWorks’ animated theatrical films, Shark Tale and Madagascar, each exceeded their box office gross and the $200 million mark.

There were other notable achievements as well, including such overperforming titles as Universal’s Ray, New Line’s The Notebook, and Fox’s Napoleon Dynamite, each more than doubling and Dynamite nearly tripling box office grosses.

But there were also some puzzlers. Two of the biggest box office champs this year—Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith and War of the Worlds—didn’t even make the Top 5 on video, and Worlds couldn’t even crack the Top 10. Together they continued a mystifying track record of Star Wars and Tom Cruise movies typically underperforming on home video.

And despite a second straight year of overall revenue decline, Disney had the Top 2 moneymakers in The Incredibles and National Treasure, the latter of which did it with more than a third of its revenue coming from rental.

The final tally of title performance for 2005 endorses the validity of the yearlong trend in which the industry is experiencing much lower top ends.

Two titles topped the $300 million mark in 2004. Only ONE did so last year, with the next biggest—National Treasure—not even close at $221 million.

Top-grossing DVD premiere Stewie generated less than half the business of The Lion King 1½ in 2004.

Consumers spent just $192 million on the Top 5 TV DVD titles last year, compared to $255 million for the Top 5 of 2004. And there were fewer overperformers among the Top 25.

Meanwhile, most of the rest of the market remained relatively static, with about the same number of titles over $200 million and over $120 million, exactly five titles over $60 million in rental revs again, the DVD premiere market holding at about $3 billion and spending on TV DVD continuing to increase overall but at a slower pace.

Perhaps the biggest area of concern is catalog sales, a topic that has been whispered among execs for the past six months.

Only two catalog titles collected more than $27 million in consumer spending last year, compared to 10 the prior year.

That’s particularly concerning news for studios champing at the bit to re-sell their libraries on high-def discs.