My Big Fat Greek Wedding has turned into a Big Fat Hollywood Success Story, last week passing the $200 million mark at the box office (putting it at No. 42 on the all-time moneymaking list) and becoming the highest-grossing romantic comedy ever. That means it has pulled in more than Pretty Woman, more than When Harry Met Sally ..., more than Four Weddings and a Funeral.
And absolutely no one saw it coming. Screenwriter and star Nia Vardalos had never had a leading role in a motion picture before, and the rest of the cast (including Lainie Kazan, John Corbett and Michael Constantine) are better known for their TV appearances than their movie work. The film opened quietly in the spring to lukewarm reviews on just a few screens in just a few cities.
Since then, people haven't stopped going to see the picture. Last weekend, it took in $3.8 million; only seven films did better. And that's after 32 weeks in theaters; none of the other films on the list have been out more than six.
Yes, My Big Fat Greek Wedding is one for the ages, undoubtedly the year's biggest cinematic success story. Nonetheless, it's not the first film to come seemingly from nowhere to take Hollywood by storm. Films with little or no advance ballyhoo have been making audiences - as well as movie studios - sit up and take notice from the very start. Here's a list of films that blew away expectations and becomes milestones in movie history.
The Great Train Robbery (1903): What a concept: Use moving pictures to tell a story rather than simply record something moving. That was the great innovation of director Edwin S. Porter, who edited 14 scenes together to tell the story of bank robbers brought to justice by a quick-thinking little girl. Generally regarded as the first American narrative film, this 10-minute short (shot on a $150 budget) may be the most influential movie ever made; audiences were said to have fled theaters in panic at the final scene, when a cowboy aims a pistol at the screen and fires. Safe to say Porter never imagined that from his quickie little shoot a multi-billion-dollar industry would grow.
It Happened One Night (1934): MGM boss Louis B. Mayer saw this project as the perfect way to put uppity star Clark Gable in his place: Loan him to a Skid Row studio called Columbia to make a silly romantic movie about an heiress and a newspaperman on a bus trip from Florida to New York. Co-star Claudette Colbert was no happier than Gable to be in this piddling trifle, especially when she found out she'd have to roll up her skirt part-way and show off one of her shapely legs for this ridiculous hitchhiking scene. But director Frank Capra must have known something they didn't. Come Oscar night, his little film swept the major awards - picture, actor, actress, director and writer - and a whole new genre, the screwball romantic comedy, was born. Gable must have spent the rest of his career waiting to be similarly spanked.
The Maltese Falcon (1941): Dashiell Hammett's 1929 detective novel already had been filmed once, 10 years earlier, to a collective yawn from the movie-going public. There was no reason to believe a second try would fare any better, especially since it was being made by a first-time director (John Huston) working with an actor who was hardly a big box-office draw (Humphrey Bogart) and featuring a script in which the story-line was almost indecipherable. But audiences loved it. The genre that would become known as film noir was off and running, and both Huston and Bogart were suddenly Hollywood bigwigs. From such inauspicious beginnings do movie classics grow.
Casablanca (1942): Hard to believe, but Casablanca was regarded as strictly B-movie material by Warner Bros., which originally had planned on casting Ronald Reagan and Ann Sheridan in the leads, before settling on Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. Plus, no one knew how the film was going to end; pages were being rewritten constantly, and no one knew until the scene was shot who was going to get on that plane. The New York Film Critics weren't impressed, naming Watch On the Rhine as the year's best picture. But what did they know?
Rebel Without a Cause (1955): James Dean was just a skinny kid with a few TV credits to his name when director Nicholas Ray's paean to teen-age rebellion was released into theaters. Audiences reacted to Dean as though they'd just touched a live wire; his performance was electric, like nothing anyone had ever seen before, and it seared its way into the American consciousness. Almost overnight, a star was born; almost as quickly - he died after making just two more movies - he passed into legend.
Bonnie and Clyde (1967): Star Warren Beatty practically had to get on his knees before studio boss Jack Warner to get this picture made, and at the time, who could have blamed Warner for his skepticism? This blood-splattered movie, which made folk heroes out of a pair of 1930s bank robbers, fit none of the established formulas. Indeed, when the first reviews came out, it was almost universally panned and soon disappeared from theaters. But Beatty pleaded that the film be given a second chance, and this time people couldn't sing its praises loud enough (famously, Newsweek's critic first lambasted the movie, then turned around in a subsequent review and admitted he'd been wrong). It ended up grossing $23 million, at the time Warner Bros.' second-biggest moneymaker ever (behind My Fair Lady).
Deep Throat (1972): Porno films were traditionally cheaply made formula films shown in seedy theaters by people who didn't want their names known. But Deep Throat changed much of that, not only by evincing actual production values and having recognizable names associated with it (Linda Lovelace became quite the celebrity, although she later renounced her porno past), but by earning a ton of money - $600 million, by some accounts. Blue movies were never the same again.
Star Wars (1977): A Western set in space, starring a bunch of no-name young actors and a pair of robots - one with the voice of an English butler, the other talking only in bleeps and squawks. Absolutely no one saw much of a future in this picture, and the suits at 20th Century-Fox seemed almost embarrassed by it, releasing it quietly in the summer of 1977. Does anybody need to be told how wrong they were? All Star Wars did is forever change the way movies were made, marketed and watched, not to mention followed-up.
Halloween (1978): All producer Irwin Yablans knew was that he wanted to make a horror film centering on babysitters. He got director John Carpenter to sign on, scrounged together a $300,000 budget, and urged everyone to do what they could. The resulting film, distributed by a tiny company (Compass International Pictures) no one had heard of, opened in only a few theaters (they couldn't afford to make lots of prints) to largely negative reviews, but good word-of-mouth started putting people in the seats. Then a few critics began to notice what a ground-breakingly horrifying picture this was, the box-office take continued to climb, and Halloween became the greatest independent-film success story to that time, grossing more than $65 million.
Porky's (1981): Who knew a comedy about a bunch of oversexed high school boys was what American funny bones were craving? At least, America's teen-age funny bones. Director Bob Clark wasn't exactly a household name, and no one in the cast (including a young Kim Cattrall, now seen in HBO's Sex and the City) had much in the way of a following. But this tale of young lads looking for action in all the expected places (the girls' bathroom, a strip bar, etc.) touched something in American audiences, grossing nearly $106 million and spawning way too many sequels and imitators.
Pulp Fiction (1994): Here's the movie that made independent films the happening genre in movies. Director Quentin Tarantino's updated take on the gloriously gory pulp fiction of popular literature had more energy than any other 10 films put together, and the shot of adrenaline it sent through Hollywood rivals the shot Uma Thurman's character memorably receives in the movie itself. Relentlessly violent, exceedingly literate and astonishingly sure-footed, it was the movie everyone had to see in 1994. Most did; it pulled in nearly $108 million. The independent film industry has been riding its coattails ever since.
Life Is Beautiful (1997): Hardly anyone knew who Roberto Benigni was; those who did knew him only as the guy unlucky enough to star in what should have been an aborted attempt at resuscitating the Pink Panther franchise (1993's Son of the Pink Panther), or as Italy's answer to Jerry Lewis. No one was prepared for this touching tribute to grace under pressure, the story of a father who clowns his way through a Nazi concentration camp in an effort to save the life of his son. Life Is Beautiful became the highest-grossing foreign film ever released in the United States (nearly $60 million), and won three Oscars, including Benigni's Best Actor nod.
The Blair Witch Project (1999): No picture's success has been more surprising than this one, purporting to be footage shot by a group of film students searching for ghosts in the Maryland woods. Absolutely original and creepy to a fault, Blair Witch was the work of first-time filmmakers Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, who hit the cinematic equivalent of a World Series-winning home run in their first-time-ever at bat. Abetted by a masterful, Internet-intensive marketing campaign by Artisan Entertainment, the film landed its makers on magazine covers the world over and raked in $140.5 million.