Paramount Home Entertainment's Beowulf DVD topped both the sales and rental charts for the week ending March 2nd, pushing American Gangster into second place.  Pixar's Ratatouille, which benefited from a national promotion, was in third place, while Sony's 30 Days of Night debuted in the fourth spot. 

The strong performance of both the Beowulf and 30 Days of Night DVDs is good news for IDW, which published the comic adaptation of Beowulf (see "IDW to Adapt Beowulf Movie") and the original Steve Niles/Ben Templesmith 30 Days of Night graphic novel upon which the movie was based.  In fact the 30 Days of Night DVD includes an insert promoting IDW's three major tie-in graphic novels as well as Comic Shop Locator Service information (see "IDW Insert in 30 Days DVD").

Don't be surprised if the Beowulf DVD displays considerable staying power in the market.  The movie itself has a powerful appeal to the same young male demographic that has made the 300 DVD such a hit, thanks in part to a screenplay by Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary that condenses the ancient episodic poem into a tight heroic saga and to director Robert Zemeckis' effective melding of Ray Winstone rich gruff vocalizations with a muscular image of the ideal Nordic hero.  Just like Zack Snyder's hugely popular adaptation of Frank Miller's 300, Beowulf celebrates a simple, but powerful form of heroism, and the primary Freudian conceit of Gaiman and Avary's screenplay -- that Grendel and the dragon are respectively the spawn of Rothgar and Beowulf, the result of their coupling with the seductive succubus voiced by Angelina Jolie -- provides a formal elegance and shape to the diffuse narrative of the original poem.

While older viewers will find the motion-capture animated performances wooden and lacking in subtlety, younger audiences who are used to seeing that same sort of animation in video games are likely to be far more accepting.  Whatever the film lacks in its few intimate moments, it more than makes up in its ferocious action sequences, which have actually been beefed (or perhaps more accurately "bloodied") up from the theatrical release in the "uncut DVD."  Beowulf is an exciting thrill ride of a movie with nearly wall-to-wall conflict--so what if the most lifelike and sympathetic character in the film is Grendel, the target audience for this heroic fantasy won't mind a bit.

Another major plus for the Beowulf DVD is that the extras are just as interesting as the movie itself.  The entire motion-capture process is brilliantly delineated in a series of featurettes that are really fun to watch--the only drag is that they don't have footage of Angelina Jolie creating her nearly nude role.  Best of all are the deleted scenes, which were cut before they were fully animated -- at times the half-finished scenes look like excerpts from a bad Puppetoon -- and by comparing them with the finished product the viewer gets a sense of how much effort goes into to creating this sort of animation.