Remember that essay I wrote two weeks ago about the long list of would-be smaller films opening on the same day as would-be giant movies? The crux of the piece, or at least the excuse for the hit-bait headline, was that Beverly Hills Cop IV was moving out of the March 25th, 2016 slot and thus leaving Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice unopposed. Well, Universal/Comcast Corp. has just announced that they are releasing My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 on March 25th, 2016. That’s right, the sequel to what is arguably the leggiest movie of all time is opening head-to-head with Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. I could make a joke about Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice fleeing its release date once again, but that would be mean. Point being, this is a classic example of the kind of David vs. Goliath counter-programming I was talking about two weeks ago. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice did not have to open unopposed, and now it won’t. The Warner Bros./Time Warner Inc. blockbuster will face off to a sequel to a movie whose theatrical run is relatively unprecedented in modern box office history.
I was going to do a retrospective on the original My Big Greek Wedding on April 19th, 2017 for the film’s 15th anniversary, but there is no time like the present. My Big Fat Greek Wedding was a family comedy about well, read that title again. The film was written by and starred one Nia Vardalos and was based on her one-woman stage show that itself was based on her marriage to a non-Greek man. The film adaptation was allegedly rejected by the major studios (some of whom wanted to get more bankable names and/or change the lead family to Hispanic). Rita Wilson and Tom Hanks eventually produced the film through their Playtone production company along with Gold Circle Films, both of whom are handling the sequel as well. Playtone is, of course, the record label in Hanks’s That Thing You Do… and now you’re humming that (awesome) song for the rest of the day. Ha! Anyway, the film received mixed-positive reviews and opened via IFC Films on just 109 screens on April 19th, 2002. It earned $597,362 on said weekend for an okay $5,531 per-screen-average. And then it kept going and going and going.
I talk a lot about films that had uncommonly leggy runs, be they Titanic, The Sixth Sense, or the trifecta of Ghostbusters, Beverly Hills Cop, and Back to the Future. Truth be told, all of them pale in comparison to My Big Fat Greek Wedding. The film earned broke the $1 million mark in its fourth weekend on 247 screens, it broke the $2m weekend mark in its 11th frame on 493 screens, and it eventually earned $11m on its 20th (!) weekend playing on 1,619 screens on Labor Day weekend. By that time, it had amassed $82m domestic off of that $597k debut weekend. And it didn’t remotely stop there. The film played for exactly 52 weeks and ended its domestic run with $241.43m off a $5m budget and a $597k. Do you want to talk weekend-to-final multipliers? My Big Fat Wedding earned 407x its debut weekend figure. If you take the entire domestic gross of Star Wars, including the rereleases, you still only get 307x the 1977 film’s $1.5 million debut weekend. Unless you count a few Disney animated films that opened at the El Capitan for a week or two before going wide (think Frozen), My Big Fat Greek Wedding is basically the leggiest movie in modern box office history.
It is the biggest-grossing romantic comedy, the biggest-grossing wedding-themed movie, and the biggest-grossing movie never to ever top the weekend box office (it was as high as second place during its peak frames). In all my years of following this stuff, I have never, ever seen anything like it. I could try and explain it. I could say that the film was a crowd-pleasing comedy that was generic enough that pretty much any ethnic group could identify their own family in the festivities. I could say that the film was counterprogramming against the likes of Spider-Man, The Bourne Identity, and The Road to Perdition. I could say that the slow platform release allowed audience discovery which in turn vastly upped the level of word-of-mouth/buzz thanks to said sense of discovery and ownership. But truth be told, that would be speculation and merely an attempt to assign logical reasoning and known box office analysis to a film whose performance utterly defied any-and-all conventional wisdom. To this day, I really can’t say why My Big Fat Greek Wedding was the movie, as opposed to any other mass-market, crowd-pleasing family comedy that ended up being platformed to death, that did the flat-out impossible.
Nia Vardalos never really capitalized on the smashing success. Her few follow-up projects were mostly ignored by audiences and I might hypothesize that the same Hollywood studios who thought she was too explicitly ethnic or not conventionally attractive enough to play a romantic comedy lead in her own bloody play also didn’t necessarily think of her for conventional mainstream projects. Also, to be brutally honest, My Big Fat Greek Wedding isn’t very good either (it's a slackly paced sitcom that masks a generic Cinderella fable with generic cultural stereotypes), but that doesn’t change its astonishing success. But we’re getting My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2. Vardalos will return to write and star while Kirk Jones (Nanny McPhee, Waking Ned Devine) will direct. Love interest John Corbett will return as well, in a sequel that "reveals a Portokalos family secret that awakens a dark enemy from the past who will unleash hell upon the world brings the beloved characters back together for an even bigger and Greeker wedding." The film will open against Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice to boot. There is ample history to show that a small film can flourish against a presumed titan, and this will be a clear case of such.
Moreover, the film will gain untold amounts of free publicity by being “that film opening against Batman v Superman” just as Tina Fey and Amy Poehler’s Sisters will benefit by being “that film opening against Star Wars: The Force Awakens.” Unless of course Warner Bros. flees in terror yet again, but I’m guessing Bruce and Clark (and Diana and Barry and Lex and Alfred and Arthur, and etc.) will stick it out and let the chips fall where they may. No I don’t think My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 will come near the original film’s $241m domestic gross. But this unexpected head-to-head showdown illustrates two worthwhile points. First, once again, rank doesn’t matter. And secondly, as Hollywood quickly shifts to an “all tent poles, all the time” strategy, it’s important to remember that smaller films can still stick it out against the 800lb gorillas. My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 will open March 25th, 2016 against Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Place your bets, folks.
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