iTunes customers are renting and buying 50,000 movies every day, Apple said Thursday. That means the company should push out some 18.25 million movies this year, a huge jump from the 5.7 million in 2007. Apple’s efforts to amp up its video offerings by adding rentals, signing all the major movie studios, and getting new releases at the same time as DVDs are sold appear to be paying off.

Based on a hypothesized average price of $6, Cynthia Brumfield calculates Apple will take in $110 million in movie revenue this year, making it tops in the paid online movie business.

Still, 18.25 million paid downloads is a long way off from the 215 million ABI Research had predicted for 2008. And Apple offers only 2,000 films, compared to Netflix’s streaming library of 10,000 items.

Apple declined to offer a current update on TV show sales, but pointed to the last number it gave out, which put the total at 150 million TV shows sold since being offered for the first time in 2006.

And on a side note: Guess what? Zoolander’s still No. 36 on the current iTunes movie sales leaderboard. Our pal Derek might have trouble turning left, but he doesn’t have any issues pushing digital downloads.