series Microsoft announced at Comic-Con 2009 that it was overseeing production of a series of seven short anime films, together called Halo Legends. Financed by 343 Industries, the animation was created by six Japanese production houses: Bee Train Production, Bones, Casio Entertainment, Production I.G., Studio 4°C, and Toei Animation. Shinji Aramaki, creator and director of Appleseed and Appleseed Ex Machina, served as the project's creative director. Warner Bros. distributed Legends on DVD and Blu-ray in February 2010. Six of the stories are officially part of the Halo canon, with the seventh, made by Toei, intended to be a parody of the universe. An animated version of The Fall of Reach was included in the Halo 5: Guardians Limited Edition and Collector's Edition. Reception and critical response The Halo franchise has been highly successful commercially and critically. During the two months following Halo: Combat Evolveds release, it sold alongside more than fifty percent of Xbox consoles. Halo 2s sales generated US$125 million on its premiere day, making it the fastest selling United States media product in history up to that time. Combined with Halos sales, the two games sold 14.8 million units before Halo 3s release. At the end of 2007, Halo 2 and Halo: Combat Evolved were the number one and two best-selling Xbox titles, respectively, and Halo 3 was the best-selling Xbox 360 title. The Halo series had sold more than 81 million copies by 2021. Halos success led to the term "Halo killer" being used to describe console games that aspire, or are considered, to be better than Halo. It was the Xbox's killer app. Total franchise sales amounted to more than $6 billion in 2021. The soundtracks to Halo 2, Halo 3, ODST and Reach all appeared on the Billboard 200 charts for at least one week. By May 2011, total gross of Halo merchandise was $2 billion, with 40 million copies of the games sold. The total amount climbed to $2.3 billion in July 2011, and $2.8 billion in January 2012. Total franchise grosses exceeded $4.6 billion by October 2015, with 25% of the figure from non-game-related merchandise. The Halo adaptations have been successful as well. Many of the novels have appeared on Publishers Weeklys bestseller charts and the Halo Graphic Novel sold more than 100,000 copies, a "rare hit" for the games-to-comics genre. Ghosts of Onyx, Contact Harvest, The Cole Protocol and the first volume