Marketing of The Passion of the Christ DVD

Thanks to David Mackinder for a link to the following story in today's New York Times today:

Pitching 'The Passion' DVD to Faithful Flocks
By LAURA M. HOLSON

Orders for DVD's and videos are 20 percent ahead of projections, Fox executives said. Other Hollywood executives said that Fox might be shipping more than 15 million copies to retailers, a volume indicating that the studio believes the film could become one of the few R-rated movies to join the ranks of the 10 top-selling DVD's.

"It's kind of an eclectic piece people will want in their collections," said Judith McCourt, director of research at Video Store Magazine, which tracks home-video sales. "This is going to be, in some vein, as popular a movie as 'Finding Nemo,' which had long sales legs. We are going to see that kind of selling power."

It has reminded me to order my own copy. I've gone for Amazon.co.uk since the NT Gateway can take a small percentage of the order (to pay for the domain name and server).

On a related topic, I received my copy of Perspectives on the Passion of the Christ yesterday (see blog entry on). I'll post comments in due course, once I've caught up with correspondence, but so far I'm pretty disappointed -- there are repeated generalized surveys on the Gospel Passion narratives and the history of Christian anti-Semitism and so far, at least, no in depth critical engagement with the film at all.