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40
© 2006 Danjaq, LLC, United Artists Corporation and
Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
For Sony Pictures Home Entertainment (SPHE), the fiscal year ended March 31, 2007
was the year of Blu-ray, with the release of 42 titles on Blu-ray Disc. During the first quarter
of calendar year 2007, Blu-ray’s share of the high definition disc market in the U.S. was
70%, compared to 30% for HD-DVD.4 SPHE’s traditional DVD business also grew in the
fiscal year ended March 31, 2007, led by its success with such titles as The Da Vinci Code,
Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby and Casino Royale.
During the fiscal year ended March 31, 2007, Sony Pictures Digital (SPD) successfully
launched Sony Pictures Animation’s first full-length feature, Open Season, which took in
nearly $190 million in ticket sales worldwide. SPD’s premier visual effects studio, Sony Pictures
Imageworks, shared an Academy Award® nomination for its work on Superman Returns
and did the visual effects for Monster House, which was nominated for an Academy Award®
for Best Animated Feature.
SPD’s Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) business launched the new “massively multiplayer
online game” Vanguard: Saga of Heroes in January 2007, which joins other successful SOE
games like EverQuest and Star Wars Galaxies. SOE continued to produce popular games
for online, PC and mobile phone users and in November 2006 released Untold Legends:
Dark Kingdom, a game for PLAYSTATION®3 (PS3).
During the fiscal year ended March 31, 2007, SPE launched its new digital distribution
business with outlets including CinemaNow, GUBA, AOL and Amazon. SPE also acquired
the user-generated video website Grouper in August 2006.
SPE has also grown its worldwide acquisitions business, which includes the development
of direct-to-DVD films and theatrical releases, and is doing more work in worldwide motion
picture production, making local language films in such countries as Russia, China, Mexico,
France and Spain.
Also during the fiscal year ended March 31, 2007, Sony Pictures worked closely with
other Sony businesses in the spirit of “Sony United.” These efforts have resulted in marketing
partnerships for Casino Royale; a forthcoming Grouper channel on the BRAVIA Internet
Video Link; SOE’s contribution to the infrastructure for the PLAYSTATION®Network (PSN);
and the inclusion of Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby on Blu-ray Disc with the
first 500,000 PS3s sold in the United States, and making Casino Royale available for free to
the first 500,000 PS3 purchasers in Europe who registered with the PSN. In all these ways
and many more, Sony Pictures is demonstrating the spirit of “Sony United” and the power of
merging content and hardware in the digital age.
1Daily Variety, January 4, 2007
2Nielsen, September 2006–May 2007
3SPE-generated based on 2006–2007 cable programming
4Nielsen VideoScan, April 1, 2007
Casino Royale on Blu-ray Disc