Music
1 – The Beatles
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This compilation from 2000 of The Beatles’ best work did very well, selling 3.6 million copies globally in its first day, making it Guinness World Records’ fastest selling album. It went on to sell 13.5 million copies in its first month alone. As of early 2015 it was still selling at least 1,000 copies a week, as it had every week since its release. To this day it remains on the Billboard’s Top 200, where it’s been for more than six years straight.
The album features nearly every number-one single from The Beatles remastered specifically for the release. The liner notes accompanying the album go into more detail, saying the tracks were “digitally remastered at 24 bits resolution, processed using Sonic Solutions NoNoise technology and mastered to 16 bit using Prism SNS Noise Shaping.”
25 – Adele
In the first week after releasing in 2015, Adele’s 25 topped the all time one-week sales numbers in different regions across the world. Having sold nearly 3.4 million units in the U.S alone, 25 took the record for largest one-week sales in a single market, a title which had been claimed by Utada’s Hikaru’s Distance since 2001.
The album didn’t just do well in the U.S., it also became the fastest selling album ever in the U.K., Adele’s home market, selling 803,000 copies in its first week. It’s done well across the world in fact, selling in its first week 305,928 copies in Canada, 263,000 in Germany, and 18,766 in New Zealand, which yes, did make it the island’s fastest selling album.
Books
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
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No, not either of the movies, though Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 does come in at number five for the biggest worldwide movie openings, having brought in more than $483 million. J.K. Rowling’s book, released five years before Harry’s final movie, sold astoundingly quickly with 11 million copies sold in the first 24 hours of its release in the U.S. and U.K combined.
That’s more than 458,333 books an hour for the first day of its release. Having purchased 8.3 million copies out of that 11 million, nearly 3 percent of the U.S. population purchased The Deathly Hallows the day it came out.
Twilight: Breaking Dawn
While the third book in the series had a solid release with 150,000 copies sold on its first day in 2007, the hype of the Twilight movie the next year helped bolster sales for the final book in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga. Released in 2008, Breaking Dawn smashed the previous book’s day one sales efforts, moving 1.3 million copies on its first day.
The movies based off Meyer’s books have also had very solid releases, with the final movie sitting at 20th on the list of most lucrative opening weekends, having earned more than $340 million.
Movies
Avengers: Infinity War
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The king of the box office never lasts forever, and the recent release of Avengers: Infinity War knocked the crown off of The Fate of the Furious to take the top spot for worldwide box office opening weekends. The movie brought in more than $640 million during its first week in theaters.
The critically-praised Infinity War, according to movie ticketing company Fandango (via Variety), surpassed the company’s 24-hour pre-sale record, a title previously held by Black Panther, in just six hours. Atom Tickets, a competitor of Fandango, said Infinity War’s first pre-sale day saw more tickets sold than Black Panther had sold in its first month.
The Fate of the Furious
Though it failed to live up to the release weekend of Furious 7 in the U.S. and Canada, international audiences carried The Fate of the Furious to the top of the worldwide box office charts, giving it the mantle of best opening weekend for a movie, bringing in nearly $542 million, until Avengers: Infinity War recently took the throne.
The Fate of the Furious did have one major advantage over Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which had previously held the top worldwide opening weekend spot, China. The Force Awakens didn’t make its way to the world’s second largest market until a month after it released elsewhere, whereas that market brought in more than $192 million for The Fate of the Furious’ opening weekend. This made it the most lucrative opening weekend in China, taking the spot from 2016’s The Mermaid.
Video Games
Grand Theft Auto V
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The highest grossing entertainment product ever didn’t start out that way, but it did get off to an excellent start, having sold 11.21 million copies in its first 24 hours on the market, for which it still retains the record of largest video game launch day ever. The years since its original release in 2013 have seen the multiplayer portion of the game, GTA Online, expanded upon greatly with everything from new vehicles and weapons to crazy game modes like Transform Races, which has your vehicle transform so races can combine flying, driving, and boating.
Rockstar’s game has broken a myriad of records including being the fastest entertainment product to gross $1 billion and generating the most revenue in 24 hours of any entertainment product ever.
Angry Birds Space
This version of Angry Birds picked up steam quickly, with 10 million devices downloading the game in just three days. It went on to be downloaded 50 million times in just 35 days, beating out the prior record holder for mobile game that that many downloads, Draw Something, which took 50 days to reach that many downloads.
It helps, of course, that Angry Birds Space is free-to-play and available on Android, iOS, PC, and Mac, but its record setting release is impressive nonetheless.
Technology
iPhone 6s
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Selling more than 13 million units during its release weekend, Apple’s iPhone 6s beat out the weekend record set by the initial iteration of the iPhone 6 at 10 million units. While Apple stopped releasing opening weekend numbers with the release of the iPhone 7, apparently because demand was outrunning supply, there are some indications they may not have reached the initial sales volume of the 6s.
Research firm Localytics analyzes the market share of each version of the iPhone, and found the market share of the 7 and 7 Plus after their release weekend was slightly lower than that of the 6s and 6s Plus’ share after their release. The firm found the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus to fare even worse with their initial market share. The iPhone X’s post-release weekend market share increased from the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus, but didn’t reach the numbers of the 7 and 7 Plus. While it’s hard to say definitively that no iPhone has sold more during its initial weekend than the 6s because the overall size of the iPhone market is constantly changing, the numbers we do have indicate the 6s remains the crème de la crème of phone releases.
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