"G.I. Joe" shows muscle at top of video charts

By Thomas K. Arnold

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - "G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra" has stormed into the No. 1 position on the national DVD sales charts.

The action film scored a whopping first-week North American sales tally of 3.8 million discs, 500,000 of them on Blu-ray, during the week ended November 8.

Some of those units wound up in as rental items, but the majority were sold directly to consumers, making "G.I. Joe" the third-biggest title so far this year in first-week sales, behind "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" and "Twilight."

"G.I. Joe" handily trounced the competition on both the Nielsen VideoScan First Alert sales chart and the Nielsen VideoScan Blu-ray Disc sales chart.

"Taking of Pelham 1 2 3" debuted at No. 2 on the overall sales chart but sold only 38.5 percent as many copies as "Joe," according to Nielsen VideoScan research. "Pelham" also debuted at No. 2 on the Blu-ray Disc chart but sold just 29.6 percent as many copies as first-ranked "Joe."

Those two new theatrical releases also bowed at No. 1 and No. 2 on Home Media Magazine's rental chart for the week, but the disparity between their totals wasn't as great. "Pelham," which earned $65.5 million in U.S. theaters, generated 78.4 percent as much rental action as "G.I. Joe," which had a domestic box-office gross of $150.2 million.

20th Century Fox's "Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs," the previous week's top seller and renter, slipped to No. 3 on both the sales and the rental chart. "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen," the previous week's top Blu-ray Disc seller, also finished in third place.

(Editing by SheriLinden at Reuters)