Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman: Deadpool & Wolverine was 2024’s biggest-selling home entertainment title in the U.K.
The expletive-ridden Marvel movie topped the list with 561,917 sales in Britain, more than 80 percent of them digital, according to new figures from the Digital Entertainment and Retail Association (ERA).
The action film — which welcomed back the Australian star in his iconic X-Men role — also led physical video sales, though revenue in the space continued to face challenges, declining 7.9 percent to £156.3 million ($194 million). Blu-ray sales were up almost 5 percent on 2023, however, although still below 2022 levels.
The good news is that total video spending grew though due to streaming, the biggest driver being subscriptions to services like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV, which grew by 8.3 percent to £4.5 billion ($5.6 billion) last year — almost 90 percent of total video revenue.
For a second successive year, video was the largest of the three sectors surveyed by ERA, with revenue increasing 6.9 percent to around £5 billion ($6.2 billion).
“More than ever before, entertainment is a visual industry and so it is no surprise that video is now the largest segment in entertainment,” said ERA CEO Kim Bayley. “Subscription video services have transformed the viewing experience for millions. The challenge for video is to find a physical format which can do for the moving image what vinyl has done for music.”
In the music sector, the likes of Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish and Sabrina Carpenter prompted Brits to spend more on recorded music in 2024 than ever before, ERA said. Consumer spending on recorded music — both subscriptions and purchases — reached £2.4 billion ($3 billion), overtaking the previous high of £2.2 billion ($2.7 billion) achieved in 2001.
To no one’s surprise, Swift’s most recent album, The Tortured Poets Department, was the biggest-selling album of the year with 783,820 copies sold in Britain. See the rest of 2024’s top-selling 10 albums in the U.K. here.
