perhaps a more apt comparison with video game sales would be sales of athletic equipment, such as a baseball glove ... or indoor games, such as a deck of cards. Though for baseball glove sales, you'd have to go back to the days when kids actually played outdoor sports ...

I'm pretty sure that this is for the entire series; Call of Duty 1-6, and not for a single title in the franchise.

Directly from your post:

Overall, the "Call of Duty" series has sold more than 55 million units since its launch in 2003, Activision said Friday, citing data compiled by NPD Group, Charttrack, GfK and internal company estimates.

MCV says this:

"The series has hit the figures after Modern Warfare 2 shattered box office and video game records with a worldwide estimated five-day sale through of approximately $550 million."

This is an amazing feat in and of itself and probably a much more amazing lead. If a movie was to gross $550 million dollars in one week, our collective industry heads would explode.

It's more apt to say the Transformers series over the first 2 movies grossed well north of $1 billion dollars.

However, there are only 2 of those movies as opposed to 6 Call of Duty titles. If you were to take into account the related titles, there would be 12 titles to the Call of Duty series.

If there were 4-8 more movies at the current rate, Transformers would shatter that mark. They are well on their way to do it now in 1-2 more movies.

The true test however, is profit margin. Whereas Transformers cost north of $200 million dollars, Call of Duty, I would surmise, is significantly cheaper to produce.

Aha...that explains the new Call of Duty lying on top of our Xbox 360 here at college lol

Howdy.

The $3 billion figure is for the series consisting of many games since 2003, not just the newest one. At $60 each, Modern Warfare 2 would have to sell 50 million units to reach $3 billion.

According to wikipedia, it did sell 4.7 units worldwide in its first 24 hours of availability. That's $282 million in one day, which certainly outdoes any movie's opening day.

Definitely a contributor to the franchise. And for those who have played the games you will know how extremely theatrical and cinematic the games are. First time I played one I was blown away how much it felt like an intense movie starring 'me'. Memorable scenes and characters. Almost like a great tom clancy novel, but with an infinite amount of replay value.

Hmm...it's a player but still not convinced it deserves a comparison to movies. People initially made comparisons to CoD's opening day 'gross' beating that of Dark Knight's opening day (which isn't entirely accurate given the trumping of that by Harry Potter and now Twilight). I figure the numbers of 'users' or 'eyeballs' whatever you'd like to call the people to be a better metric. Opening day for CoD: MW2 was 5.17 mil units; for Dark Knight, it was probably around 8-9 mil tickets. Money isn't everything - penetration could only go as far as the amount of Xbox's owned while a successful movie would far surpass that in the general population.

Sorry but these comparisons tend to irk me. Worse is when people compare adapted movies to the books they were based on.