The entire movie industry is all about the cinema. Any film released direct-to-DVD is viewed as not worth your time (a fair estimation most of the time) and the home video market is rarely paid as much attention as the box office. Which is pretty strange given how it's an increasingly important part of how people consume films. The likes of Waterworld, which is still highly regarded as one of the most high-profile flops ever, managed to actually turn a profit once they hit home video (in that film's case VHS), but that's often ignored as a cheeky little nest-egg that studio's don't have to report. In fact, if you want to find actual numbers for a film's post-cinema success you'll have to bring a calculator and some extreme patience; finding actual information about home video sales is nigh on impossible. All coverage is geared towards what's selling well right at this very moment (almost exclusively the latest releases) so getting an idea of the biggest success of all time is hard. And as records for VHS and the early days of DVD are pretty sketchy anyway it makes figuring out how much they helped certain film's overall takings a real pain. Blu-Ray, the youngest of the mainstream forms of physical media, is the only one where actual totals can be accurately calculated. The numbers aren't perfect - they only measure from after the format won the war against HD DVD, so early releases like Casino Royale (once the face of Blu-Ray) aren't counted - but they're the best at seeing what people actually have on their shelves. So today, using the best, publicly available numbers out there, we bring you to twenty best selling (domestically) Blu-Rays of all time. And there's a few surprises.
20. The Dark Knight
Total Copies Sold: 2,643,730 Here's a film you really have to own. Beyond the obvious draw of Heath Ledger's Oscar-winning performance, The Dark Knight betrays its two and half hour running time to be an infinitely rewatchable film. The placing of The Dark Knight at only twentieth is a little erroneous. The records used in this list begin in summer 2009, meaning the sales following the initial release of Christopher Nolan's superhero epic on home video aren't included. Still, sitting on this list at all is impressive. Released at a time when HD DVD was still around (although by this point Warner Bros. had pulled out and the format was in decline), many people hadn't made the jump to high-def home video, so most people's copy of The Dark Knight tended to be DVD; when looking at that format it's a top three candidate.
