Release
To promote Sleepy Hollow, Paramount Pictures featured the film's trailer at San Diego Comic-Con International in August 1999. The following October, the studio launched a website, which Variety described as being the "most ambitious online launch of a motion picture to date." The site (sleepyhollowmovie.com) offered visitors live video chats with several of the filmmakers hosted by Yahoo! Movies and enabled them to send postcards, view photos, trailers and a six-minute behind-the-scenes featurette edited from a broadcast that aired on Entertainment Tonight. Extensive tours of 10 sets where offered, where visitors were able to roam around photographs, including the sets for the entire town of Sleepy Hollow, forest, church, graveyard and covered bridge. Arthur Cohen, president of worldwide marketing for Paramount, explained that the "Web-friendly" pre-release reports from websites such as Ain't It Cool News and Dark Horizons encouraged the studio to create the site. In the weeks pre-dating the release of Sleepy Hollow, a toy line was marketed by McFarlane Toys. Simon & Schuster also published The Art of Sleepy Hollow (ISBN 0671036572), which included the film's screenplay and an introduction by Tim Burton. A novelization, also published by Simon & Schuster, was written by Peter Lerangis.
Sleepy Hollow was released in the United States on November 19, 1999 in 3,069 theaters, grossing $30,060,467 in its opening weekend at the #2 spot behind The World Is Not Enough. Sleepy Hollow eventually earned $101,071,502 in domestic gross, and $105 million in foreign sales, coming to a worldwide total of $206,071,502. David Walsh of the National Institute on Media and the Family criticized the film's financial success from the exaggeration of gore. "The real impact is not so much that violent images create violent behavior," Walsh explained, "but that they create an atmosphere of disrespect." Burton addressed the concerns as a matter of opinion. "Everyone has a different perception of things. When I was a kid," Burton continued, "I was probably more scared by seeing John Wayne or Barbra Streisand on the big screen than by seeing violence."
Paramount Home Video first released Sleepy Hollow on DVD in the United States on May 23, 2000. The HD DVD release came in July 2006, while the film was released on Blu-ray Disc two years later, in June 2008.
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