In an interesting public battle over the count of ticket sales internationally, Sony Corp. has challenged Disney's (DIS) assertion that they have broken the six-day record for sales worldwide, bringing in a $404 million total, which they claim beat Sony's "Spider-Man 3," which brought in $382 million over the six-day period they opened with.
According to Sony (SNE), Disney counted seven days for their totals, which if they had done the same, they would have finished at $418.1 million.
"There are some irregularities in their claim regarding record-setting," Sony said in the statement. "There should be a consistent standard in international box-office reporting."
Sony added that Disney included Italy and France in their totals on May 22, which would make it a seven-day period which they counted. Disney countered saying that they only earned $1.4 million in those two countries; meaning they would have still beat Sony. Of course if Sony added an extra day, they would have beat Disney.
When Disney changed their launch at the last moment and allowed showing on Thursday night, I thought that was a little odd. Then when Disney announced that they were going for a Memorial Day record rather than a three-day record, it started to make sense.
Disney knew from its business intellegence that they weren't going to be able to beat Spider-Man 3 for the three-day weekend, but that beating the four-day Memorial record of the X-Men definitely was attainable; so they simply changed their target.
The question is why are they doing all this postering. Why would it possibly matter. First, it's connected to buzz and marketing. They couldn't allow the high expectations of the film to fall flat, not after the last "Pirates" success. They knew it could hurt them.
Where it would hurt them more though, which is what they are counting on for their profits, is in the DVD sales. In the end, this is what this is mostly about - positioning themselves for the resultant DVD sales, which if they have no record-breaking numbers to include in their campaign, could cause a loss of overall sales. They couldn't let that happen.
It does show that there was some panic at the Mouse before the movie was ever released ... the reason why they're trying so hard to manufacture some type of record to include with their marketing campaign in the future.
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