Rolling with the whole talking to myself thing, I went investigating and implemented some of the suggestions with d3 and pilfered assets:

http://cold-mountain-3633.herokuapp.com/ (tested only in chrome)

1. Does "hover and update only one poster at a time" right. If goodfli.ms had built there website as something that communicated via json instead of HTML, I would have rolled this sort of page into the graphic as well:

http://goodfil.ms/film/89441-cars-2

2. Attempted to make a visual difference between netflix and itunes. I couldn't figure out how they determined whether something was in itunes, so the colors are more of a proof of concept than anything meaningful.

3. Rolled out a trick using fisheye distortion to allow people to explore density spatially via their mouse. To learn how it was done, think about how this works:

http://bost.ocks.org/mike/fisheye/

Overall, this is quick, dirty and probably missing the point of the original graphic.

Self serving plug: if you, fair reader, have data you want to be smeared in d3.js lipstick, I do requests: https://www.odesk.com/users/~~80bea7ba2750c34b