Fun With Numbers: Various US Anime Movie Disk Sales Totals

I recently made a trial account on opusdata to see what I could scrounge up as far as anime data goes. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get a ton of data, since the backlog of weekly charts are anything but free. But I did come away with their sales figures for a couple different anime movies, whose sales ranged from over a million to a couple thousand depending on how mainstream the title was:

anime_movies-us_salesThe One Piece/Fairy Tail movie numbers may or may not be reflective of what the shows regularly put up. I have a couple volumes’ worth of data for each, and plan on estimating what their long-term sales are after I get additional confirmation of the amazon model I’m currently using. It does seem, based on a cursory glance at the current rankings of March/April releases, like US releases have fairly long tails.

Via Anime Insider: US DVD Production and Markets (October 2005)

A pair of articles here. One long one about the process of producing an R1 release, and a short one about the state of the market in 2005.

The second article gives 30,000-50,000 copies as a range for strong R1 titles, with Appleseed and Ghibli titles selling over 100,000.* In contrast, B-list titles seem to rarely break 20,000.

*I can confirm this second claim, as I recently got an opusdata trial account and pulled sales figures for a bunch of anime movies, which I will post sometime soon. Unfortunately, their extended weekly charts, which would be invaluable for US market research, cost something in the range of $1000 (or more if you want the backlog), which I’m not paying.

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