"How did Brokeback Mountain break

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"How did Brokeback Mountain break out? By surgically targeting where the movie would play in its initial release; selling it as a romance for women rather than a controversial gay-bashing tale; and opting out of the culture wars rather than engaging them." So reads John Lippman's Wall Street Journal article [free] about the surprising box-office success of this film, which is selling more tickets than Munich by a 3-to-1 margin and, if you ask me, is looking more and more likely to hit or top $100 million. Lippman reports data from Focus Features marketing guy David Brooks to wit: "As the weeks pass, the demographics of the Brokeback audience have shifted. Gays turned out for the first weekend, with 60% of the audience male and 40% female. But in the next three weeks, women responded to marketing and the audience flipped to 60% female and 40% male. Now, as the media attention intensifies in the wake of the film's wins at the Golden Globes, heterosexual men are going to the film on their own and the women are sliding back down to the mid-50 percentile."