“Barbie” was the queen of home entertainment in the UK in 2023

The movie “Barbie” was the queen of 2023 home entertainment, with 700.000 sales across Disc and Digital EST and VOD, according to figures from the British Association for Screen Entertainment (BASE) and Official Charts Company (OCC).

According to BASE and OCC's report, the value of the UK home entertainment category rose to £4.9 billion in 2023, including all streaming video on-demand (SVOD), digital, disc sales, and rental, which is up 10.6% year-on-year, following a 14.3% rise year-over-year in 2022. The rise was driven by the ongoing surge in consumer uptake of subscription services, with over 56 million subscriptions in 2023, a 5.4% year-over-year rise.

In detail, “Barbie” was UK’s biggest visual entertainment title across theatrical and home entertainment, with a performance of £95.5 million at the UK box office, as well as a value of over £9.5 million across transactional home entertainment in 2023, through Premium EST (PEST) and Premium VOD (PVOD) releases in September 2023, and physical release in October 2023. This amounted to a collective consumer spend of just over £200 per minute on Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” across the year, across all visual formats.

Furthermore, the report notes that 54 titles were released on Premium Video on Demand (PVOD) and/or Premium EST, one more than 2022, as audiences grow accustomed to the new shape of release windows. “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” scored the second biggest PVOD week one sales of 2023 (following “Barbie”) with £428.000 on PVOD only, following its release on December 13, building on the £12.2 million box office performance across six weeks in 2023.

Universal Pictures' “Super Mario Bros.” was the biggest kids title on home entertainment in the UK in 2023, with 648.000 transactional sales across home entertainment, and was the third biggest selling title of the year. The success of the “Super Mario Bros.” movie alongside “Barbie,” and most recently “Wonka,” that has amassed £45 million at the UK box office to date over Christmas 2023, further demonstrates the love of known characters for audiences, when told in new and exciting ways, the report says.

Meanwhile, the first season of “Game of Thrones: House of the Dragon” ruled the TV charts for the second year running, snatching the number one spot despite its release at the end of 2022, and prior to the release of season two on Sky/Now in the UK in summer 2024. The strong appetite for audiences for ownership of SVOD premier shows is clear, as the rest of the top five TV titles include “The Last of Us” at number 2, “Star Trek – Strange New Worlds” at number 3, “Doctor Who – 60th Anniversary Specials” at number four, and “The Walking Dead” (season 11) at number 5.

“It is genuinely wonderful to see the volume of units purchased and the range of titles in 2023’s top five UK buy, rent and own home entertainment chart, as it perfectly demonstrates the convenience and breadth of this part of the home entertainment offering, and how much consumers value that. Audiences can control when and where they watch the films, TV shows and special interest programming they love, in a completely complimentary way to the SVOD services they invest in, which is shown in those fantastic final week figures of 2023: home entertainment titles were bought, downloaded and rented nearly one million times across digital and physical in that week alone, in addition to the multiple SVOD and linear TV options,”  said Liz Bales, Chief Executive of BASE.