The non-woke, pro-masculine Top Gun: Maverick is now the fastest selling digital sell-through of all time.
This means that it sold more copies in the first week after its release as a digital purchase than any other movie ever.
Currently, Top Gun: Maverick is not available in any other format. If you want to watch it at home, you must buy a digital copy for around $24.99. You can’t even rent a digital copy. It’s purchase only. The physical DVD and Blu-ray release will not happen until November 1.
What’s more — and this is really something — after just one week of release, Top Gun: Maverick is “already one of the Top 20 best-selling digital releases in history.” Put another way, in just one week, Top Gun: Maverick sold more digital copies than all but 19 movies have sold over their entire digital lifetimes.
Currently, at the box office, and after 15 weeks in consecutive release, Top Gun: Maverick is the number two movie in America. In all of its 15 weeks, it has only dipped out of the top five once. Additionally, this sequel to the still-beloved Top Gun (1986) is the fifth highest-grossing movie in domestic history.
Oh, and the number-one movie in America today is the non-woke Spider-Man: No Way Home, which was originally released last December and re-released this Labor Day weekend with some extra scenes.
Meanwhile, Hollywood’s woketard movies are either imploding, flopping, or underperforming.
But I want to go back to this whole idea of home video…
For more than a decade, since the earliest days of Breitbart News (when it was just Big Hollywood), I have been ridiculing all the excuses Hollywood and their intellectual slaves in the entertainment world have fabricated to rationalize the total collapse in home video sales — which includes DVDs, Blu-ray, digital, etc.
These idiots have blamed the home video crash on piracy, video games, and Redbox, and I’m sure someone among these moral illiterates has at one time or another time blamed Climate Change, colonization, and the Bad Orange Man.
Here are the astonishing numbers: In 2005, DVD sales generated $16 billion. By 2018, that number had dropped to $2.2 billion. Blu-Ray sales did not make up the difference. In 2018, Blu-Rays only accounted for $1.8 billion in sales.
The death of home video sales is a very big deal. People purchased so many VHS and DVD copies for two decades that it became a factor in film budgeting. Hollywood could count on a movie doing almost as well on home video as it did in theaters. For example, the first Spider-Man movie sold 16 million DVD copies in 2002. Shrek 2 (2004) sold 26 million copies. Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl (2003) sold 28 million.
So far this year, the biggest seller is Spider-Man: No Way Home, with a combined DVD/Blu-Ray sale of 1.7 million units. That non-woke title is blowing away the second place Ghostbusters: Afterlife, which sold only 868,000 units. The dreadful Matrix: Resurrections has moved only 420,000 units. The original Matrix (1999) sold 30 million!
I have always marked the decline of movies as right around 2005. This was when Hollywood caught Bush Derangement Syndrome. This was when Hollywood started to hate their own audience. This was when contempt for Middle America took hold. This was when Hollywood became an insulated institution primarily interested in making movies to impress one another. This was also when the Oscars basically turned into the Independent Spirit Awards.
This was also when the Middle America backlash began, and it was Middle America, everyday people, who were purchasing all those DVDs.
Are there exceptions? Don’t be stupid. There are always exceptions. Overall, though, almost every movie after 2005 that was not a theme park ride or cartoon had no interest in attracting Middle America. And even some of those theme park rides gave us the middle finger.
Listen, I love movies. There might be people who love movies as much as I do, but no one loves movies more. I own over 4,000 movies. Movies are my great passion and have been for 50 years, ever since I saw Don Siegel’s masterpiece Dirty Harry (1971) at age five.
I’ve been collecting movies since 1981 when I spent every penny I had to purchase a VHS copy of The Good, the Bad, and Ugly (1966). I love the feeling of owning a movie, and starting in the mid-80s straight through to about 2005, that feeling hit all the time. You’d walk out of a movie theater thinking I can’t wait to own that movie so I can watch it whenever I want. And it wasn’t just action blockbusters. It was movies like Field of Dreams (1989) and Home Alone (1990) and Crimson Tide (1993) and Notting Hill (1999) and Friday (1995) and Boiler Room (2000).
Those movies were successful because they cast their spell and held it. In some cases, they accomplished much more than that, but they honored the first and most important rule of storytelling: cast the spell and don’t break it.
Since 2005, that rule has been violated more frequently, and today we’re at a point where most movies are unwatchable. It’s not just that they’re unimaginative and tired; the spell is constantly broken to allow the filmmakers to inject themselves into the story and yell at us over our political and religious beliefs.
If you want to sell movies on home video, you have to make movies people want to see again and again.
With rare exceptions, Hollywood no longer does that. So instead of exiting the theater delighted, inspired, and smiling (which used to be the norm), today we exit deflated, insulted, feeling ripped off, or with a heavy sense of meh.
Piracy and video games and Redbox are not killing Hollywood…
Hollywood is killing Hollywood.
You want to know why Top Gun: Maverick is breaking records? It’s not only due to its being a great movie. It also reminds us of what it used to feel like to go to the movies: walking out of the theater delighted, inspired, and smiling.
People miss that.
A lot of people.
We’re dying to fall back in love with the movies. … But Hollywood hates us too much to let us back in.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.
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