Listen, we know that selling the Redbox crowd on the works of Terence Davies and Olivier Assayas can be tough. But The Accountant, America? Of all the movies out there, that’s the one you decided to make the No. 1 most popular digital rental of 2017? Okay…
That odd little factoid comes from the Motion Picture Association of America (via The Hollywood Reporter), which for the first time has included home entertainment—i.e., streaming, because it is 2018—numbers in its annual report on the financial heath of the film industry. A 31 percent jump in consumer spending on digital rentals and streaming services contributed to an overall 11 percent rise in home entertainment spending last year, more than offsetting the 15 percent drop in physical media sales. (That’s no surprise, though; the DVD and Blu-ray markets have been dying a slow, agonizing death for years now.) As the MPAA’s Charles Rivkin points out in the report, it’s impossible to separate TV from films as far as many streaming services go; the question here is whether that really matters, or if a rising tide, as the mysterious “they” always say, truly lifts all boats.
The second and third most popular digital rentals of 2017 were Moana and Wonder Woman, by the way.