Layer Cake Gets DVD Success

Matt Feeney over at Slate writes about how cockney gangster film Layer Cake has become a "phenomenon" mainly due to word of mouth. Most major releases take in a little less as a DVD rental than they did
in theaters, he says, but no recent film has so outperformed its theatrical box office as Layer Cake.

Feeney suggests that the success is a sign of the future of movies:

"It raises interesting questions about the future of movies in
a business increasingly dominated by the home-video market—not just
whether movies can perform markedly better in home video than in
theaters, but what kind of movies are likely to do so. Layer Cake
is a good test case in part because it’s a wildly complicated and
morally ambiguous film. It also has the usual problem with Cockney
crime films: On first pass, the American viewer understands
approximately one-third of the dialogue. Its popularity on DVD suggests
that viewers are willing to abide this type of difficulty when the
"pause" and "rewind" buttons are only a thumb’s-length away."

Sorted!

Slate Magazine
Layer Cake At Amazon