‘95 Video Rentals Down

For home video, 1995 was an alarmingly bad year - and a spectacularly good one.

On the down side, rental transactions fell by about 10 percent, which was not the best news for a medium that still depends on people’s taking movies home on Friday and Saturday nights.

Analysts tend to blame Hollywood. Studies showed that people either were going to video stores less often than they did last year or, when they did go, were leaving with fewer tapes.

More than ever, this was a year for hugely popular films - “Pulp Fiction,” say, or “Dumb and Dumber” - to dominate the rental scene without a solid roster of other popular films to back them up.

But if weak movies weren’t renting, a few other films were selling at a rate that could only be called staggering. “The Lion King,” for example, went on sale in the middle of March and sold 20 million copies in six days.

By the end of the month, Chilton Research Services estimated that nearly 1 in 3 households in the United States owned a copy. How many other products can claim that alacrity of acceptance?

Time and again, consumers proved they would buy movies as readily as rent them. “Snow White” sold more than 27 million copies, “Forrest Gump” more than 15 million.

Perhaps the most impressive sales performance of all was not by one film but three gathered in a box and priced at a relatively high $49.98.

By the end of the year, the “Star Wars” trilogy will have sold more than 15 million sets.

Next month, “Star Wars” the movie will be removed from circulation by Fox Home Video, never to reappear in its present form. Future unavailability of that film has helped to swell sales of the trilogy, but so did a complete promotional overhaul.