James Surowiecki has a great article in the New Yorker this week (does he ever not have a great article in the NY any given week, love that guy) on the state of Hollywood’s current identity crisis “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.

Sounds like a long-tail argument to me. If there was any fundamental change in business practice to emerge from the dot-bomb shenanigans, this is it. In the words of an Amazon employee, “We sold more books today that didn’t sell at all yesterday than we sold today of all the books that did sell yesterday.”

So part of the movie industries problem is that each film is competing not only with its contemporaries but with all the great films that have come before it. Why would I want to see one ridiculous knock-off after another, when I can get the real deal on DVD for $9.97 and $8.98 respectively?

Read the full article “Disk Averse,” or gorge yourself on all manner of DVD goodness.