After being bumped out of the #1 spot for a week, HBO’s True Blood: The Complete First Season is back on top after selling 136,000 units (nearly $4.5 million), a slight increase from last week. It’s nearing 1 million units sold after 4 weeks of DVD sales.
Sales of last week’s leader, Weeds – Season Four, fell 60% to 94,000 units (just over $2 million). The Shield – The Complete Seventh Season began its DVD sales with 80,000 units (nearly $3 million).
DVD sales of Season 4 of Prison Break fell over 50% in its second week to just 60,000 units. 24 is off the list after three weeks.
US TV Show DVD Sales for Week Ending Jun 14, 2009
| Title | Units this Week | % Change | Total Units | Sales this Week | Total Sales | Weeks in Release |
| True Blood: The Complete First Season | 136,070 | 1.40% | 992,880 | $4,488,949 | $35,045,605 | 4 |
| Weeds – Season Four | 94,283 | -60.60% | 333,605 | $2,356,132 | $8,336,789 | 2 |
| The Shield – The Complete Seventh Season | 80,179 | 80,179 | $2,965,821 | $2,965,821 | 1 | |
| Prison Break – Season Four | 60,069 | -51.30% | 183,453 | $1,921,607 | $5,894,572 | 2 |
-
You can see past weekly lists of TV Show DVD Sales numbers here.
Source: the-numbers.com
Wow. Do many other TV shows sell a million? I know Lost was the top selling for a long time, but I have no clue as to its absolute numbers.
Doug, True Blood’s DVD sales are *very* good for a TV show, but, sadly, I don’t have enough knowledge to give a better historical perspective.
True Blood is a great tv show and its become one of HBO’s highest rated shows of all time. Stellar cast, stellar writing can mean stellar ratings. True Blood has been a True success for HBO. I wonder what Nikki Finke thinks about True Blood now?
Was Reaper listed anywhere on there? It was released during that week…
Not everybody has HBO . So I guess a lot of themm prefer to buy the DVD that just pay HBO for just watching one show .
Anything Vampire is a good investment right now ,specially if they do a good promotion like they did with True Blood.
Charles, the list I pull from is only the top 30 DVD sellers for the week. #30 on the list the week of June 14 sold 51,588 units. So, if Reaper was on sale it was below that number.
Mia, you’re not kidding about the Vampire craze. Twilight has sold $157 million worth of DVDs.
CBS should be kicking its teeth right now for canceling Moonlight. I say this even though I wasn’t a fan of the show. You know what two shows ought to be re-aired again? Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Dark Shadows. Perhaps both shows could run on Chiller..
I’m surprised that FX hasn’t began airing Buffy again.
Hey, Doug, last TV show to sell a million was the first season of Heroes in fall of 2007, and several shows did in the fall of 2006. But TB is the first to reach 1 million units since Heroes.
I bet the slight bump is due to buildup to the season premiere, and next week’s numbers will crest as people intrigued by the premiere but don’t have the show buy it.
I am thrilled by these numbers.
Lost’s third season reached a million, but took a couple more weeks to do it. The final column is the last charted week.
2nd Season…Sept. 2006…899,000 first week…..1,245,000 after five weeks
3rd Season…Dec. 2007….629,000 first week…..1,192,000 after seven weeks
4th Season…Dec. 2008….474,000 first week…..976,000 after four weeks
So, the 4th season might be close to TB’s numbers, but ABC is in three times as many households. (And Lost’s sales have dropped every year.) In the Fall of 2006, the list often had over a dozen TV shows, but in recent years the list has been dominated by films.
True Blood appears to be the best cable release in the site’s timespan (from February 2006).
In 35 days, Dollhouse will be out on DVD and it’ll make this “True Blood” show look like nothing!!
Dollhouse returns in 87 days!! Yayyy!!
Yeah, JBF, it’ll rival True Blood’s sales…the ninth week sales! Ba dum kish.
Seriously, at about $3 million per episode and twelve episodes, HBO has about recouped True Blood’s expenses through the DVDs alone.
JBF – in all seriousness, I’m somewhat concerned about the price of the DH DVD set. Even Amazon’s heavily discounted price is above $30, which seems high for 13+2 episodes, of which even us fans admit a large number are barely watchable.
I’m wondering if that, and the unpopularity of the show in general, will lead to abysmal DVD sales and ultimately hasten Dollhouse’s cancelation. I hope not, but I think it’s more than possible.
WHAT ABOUT EVERWOOD?? IS THERE A CHANCE IT WAS ON THE TOP 30??
George, all the TV shows in the top 30 are in the list above.
Nicely done True Blood !
Will you post HBO ratings for sunday (True Blood s02e02) when avaible ? Thanks
It would be interesting to see what % was bluray.
Nehalem: the rating will be up as soon as it is released. I’m on the lookout for the numbers.
And romo, I don’t think The Numbers includes BluRay, but I’m sure if BR is included, TB’s well past the million mark.
Drew is correct, those numbers do not include Blu-Ray.
I would really like to know how many units TB sold when they add in the Blu-Ray numbers. Just about everyone I know over on the True Blood Wiki site bought the BR for the extra features.
TBFan, if anyone can find a site that has Blu-Ray numbers, I’ll post them.
According to one figure I found (Source: Nielsen VideoScan First Alert) for the week ending June 14, True Blood was in 10th place of the Top 20 Selling Blu-Ray titles. Their Blu-Ray share was 11% for the title.
That is the most recent figures I could find. Maybe you can make more sense of it than I can.
http://www.homemediamagazine.com/top-sellers/top-20-sellers-week-ended-61409
TBFan, interesting list, Blu-Ray share likely means that % of the total DVDs sold were Blu-Ray.
It’s interesting that this isn’t getting more publicity, maybe HBO is waiting until it hits 1 million to do some big press release or something…still, if this is a rare occurrence, you would think entertainment sites that track these things would report it.
I am a bit surprised as well that HBO isn’t trumpeting this like crazy, but we fans are doing it for them. The audience’s doubling over the first season is usually attributed to the great word-of-mouth about TB.
True Blood is awesome!
Hmm, assuming that the http://www.the-numbers.com’s DVD charts DO NOT include Blu-ray sales and that the http://www.homemediamagazine.com’s charts give accurate shares (you can go back and check their site to get previous weeks share as well) then a bit of number crunching gets you to a total of ~ 1,140,000 units sold for True Blood when Blu-ray sales are included.
OK, after being certain that I *knew* that the-numbers.com figures didn’t include Blu-Ray I scoured the site for that explanation and couldn’t find it. Absent that, it’s highly likely I was mistaken (always likely) and they *do* include Blu-Ray.
All right. Either way, True Blood’s numbers reflect the addictiveness of this show.
True Blood is ok but it’s really nothing that special. There’s a following out there that will watch almost anything vampire related. The same can be said about SciFi and other subcultures. Put these shows on regular TV and they typically don’t last much more then a season.
I like the show and usually hate anything vampire related. Often, the human characters are more interesting than what the vampires are doing, and I started watching the show because of the (human) lead character.
For those looking for Everwood numbers the set was to be released on June 16th and the latest list on that site ends on June 14th so it should be on the next list hopefully.
Perhaps I can provide some perspective. Both Firefly and Family Guy were big DVD selling hits, they never sold close to a million this fast. More like 300-400k in a few weeks. Same thing for Battlestar Galactica, another Sci-Fi hit, which had about 300k in 3 weeks on sale. You might want to take a look at Star Trek, X-Files, Seinfeld, Friends, and other big hit shows. It’s really a measure of how big the core fanbase is, for True Blood, it’s obviously a big one. I’d like to compare these numbers to the Sopranos DVD sales, or OZ DVD sales, just to compare numbers from other HBO shows. It would not surprise me to find that Sci-Fi series overall tend to sell DVDs more than “regular” television shows which had much larger broadcast audiences.
Remember, this is a premium channel. Just by the fact your watching it means you a) have cable/directTV and b) are affluent enough to afford premium networks. Which means you naturally have a DVD player. The demo’s for this show’s audience are more attractive to advertisers, I’m guessing, because they’ve probably got more money on average. Of course, since HBO has no commercials, that doesn’t matter as much, though I’m sure the group which runs HBO would like to take a lot at these guys viewing habits.
Just some numbers that might interest you further. 24 Season 7 only did about 400k units in 4 weeks. South Park did about 300k in 6 weeks. THe former is a hit series on broadcast, the latter a hit series for cable. Obviously 24 has more core fans, but not many more than South Park. Yet, 24 has more live viewers.
So does this mean Cable viewers of a TV show may be more “loyal” to their show than Broadcast watchers are? I wonder if in general the proportion of DVD buyers for cable shows are higher than for broadcast, i.e. if 24 gets 8 million viewers a night, but only 400k units sold, that’s 5%, while South Park gets 3 million viewers and 300k sold, for 10%. Might be a good metric to measure fan “loyalty.”
Oh, and I took a look at the 2007 and 2008 Best Selling DVD charts on the site. Heroes Season 1 was a Top 100 TV Show, selling 1.6 million DVD’s, and it placed at #72. The rest of the list is movies or specials, like BBC’s Planet Earth, and #100 had 1.158 million units sold. In 2008, the Office Season 4 sold 1.05 million units to claim #88. Charlie Wilson’s War was #100 with 975,701. Now it’s too early to tell, but based on the past 2 years, I’d say True Blood Season 1 is a good candidate to break the Top 100 list for 2009 when the year ends. Quite a feat for a TV series on Cable.
The NY Post did a story on this…
http://www.nypost.com/seven/06252009/tv/true_hits_1m_175939.htm
I think it’s the sex that’s selling the show so well just as much as it’s the fact that vampires seem to get zeitgeisty about once a decade or so. Since the PG-13ification of everything in American pop culture over the course of the new millenium, the audience for those skin without pornoguilt ‘erotic thrillers’ of yore like ‘Basic Instinct’ and ‘Fatal Attraction’ has been completely neglected, and ‘True Blood’ is the only unsubtitled new game going to fill that void.
True Blood is definitely more than sex and vampires, although obviously that IS a big part of the appeal – and rightfully so LOL! The show’s quality is considerable in other aspects – the acting, the directing, the writing. The show is really good. And it being “over the top” in many scenes is a plus as well.
It’s truly a shame that a show like this CAN’T be shown on broadcast TV due to the Puritanism of US society – which is one reason WHY cable is eating into broadcast TV.