New Yorker: Disk Averse. "What’s becoming increasingly clear is that the people who buy DVDs are, for the most part, not the people who go to the movies on opening weekend. According to research from Fox Home Entertainment, DVD buyers tend to be older than your typical theatregoer. More of them are women, and most of them don’t see movies in theatres before buying them. Most important, the new DVD audience is so diverse that companies can target niche markets and still sell millions of disks. Because specialized markets are more predictable, the risk of failure is much lower, and so small-to-mid-budget movies can be very profitable indeed.

It will be hard, of course, for Hollywood to break itself of the habit of fetishizing opening weekends, but some studios seem to have done it, most notably New Line Cinema (which made “Wedding Crashers”). Over the past four years, the company has flourished by combining lots of small- and mid-budget movies—including DVD hits like “The Notebook,” and “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle”—with one big “tent-pole” investment (“The Lord of the Rings”). Over time, other studios are bound to adopt similar strategies. Selling disks through Wal-Mart will always lack the glamour of a première at Grauman’s. But, as Hollywood learned back in 1918, it sure beats working for a living."