The New Yorker pulled the Annie Proulx short story "Brokeback Mountain" out of its archive in advance of the movie's release in NY and LA this Friday. I've long thought that short stories are the literary genre most suitable for adaptation to film. Both forms contain a similar dramatic density. In a short story, with fewer pages to work with than a novel, a writer needs to choose details and words with great care.
Based on passing conversations, I suspect the movie will clean up among younger women. From that perspective, the movie was smartly cast. For the rest of the world, the movie's being billed as an arthouse romance, a universal love story, anything but a gay cowboy movie ("gay cowboy" being the media's favorite two word moniker for describing the movie's premise, despite the studio's efforts to not show any funny business between Ledger and Gyllenhall in all the marketing, from the trailer on down).
An article in Newsweek contained the tidbit that the poster for Brokeback Mountain was inspired by the one for Titanic.