Paramount Home Video has just started shipping James Cameron’s Titanic on DVD to retailers. The disc has now set a record for the highest shipping units in the history of the format – whatever that record is worth for. More than 1 million units have been shipped to retailers in North America for its release next week. Paramount executives are already touting the disc as the best-selling DVD release, which is not entirely accurate as apart from pre-orders no disc has been sold yet, so let’s just hope Paramount manages to sell all those copies they ship into the market. After all it’s one thing to flood the sales channels, and a completely different thing to actually sell the items through, and Paramount wouldn’t be the first publisher in history to sit on an abundance of product.

Available exclusively in the widescreen format, the DVD of the most successful movie of all time will feature the original theatrical trailer, a collectible 10-page fold-out booklet that features visuals of each scene selection and a full-motion menu introduction. It comes as a dual layer, single disc that has been digitally mastered by THX® for superior sound and picture quality and features Dolby Digital English5.1 Surround, English Dolby Surround and French Dolby Surround soundtracks.

We here are actually looking forward to this fall’s fight-it-out scenario with a number of high caliber releases clearly fighting it out among each other. While “Titanic” is a big movie, the DVD is coming too late for many to really make a big splash. While it will clearly sell extremely well, upcoming releases like Warner’s “The Matrix”, Universal’s “The Mummy”, or Disney’s animated features will certainly have just as much an impact on the overall market as “Titanic” does.