Indies Light Up the Box Office in 2002

This year belongs more to the audience than to the filmmakers. The main indie standard bearer, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, is a true word-of-mouth success story. With $222.5M in grosses at the North American box office to-date, the $5M film could easily gross more than $500M worldwide from all sources. As all of you probably know by now, the investing companies didn’t think there was much of an audience and hired a consultant, Bob Berney (now with Newmarket Capital), to take out the film. The audience found the film and the rest is truly history. Among other films that general wisdom dismissed but scored successes (albeit not at Wedding’s extraordinary level) are Frida (still in release), Y tu mamá también and The Crime of Father Amaro. All three feature Mexican actors with the last two being made in Spanish. They may be the cusp of the Hispanic market that Hollywood has always known was there, but didn’t know how to tap.

Once again the Golden Globes have given nominations to an array of independent films of varying budgets. Among the dramatic feature contenders are About Schmidt, Gangs of New York, Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and The Pianist. In the musical/comedy category are My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Nicholas Nickleby. Among the critics’ associations, the Los Angeles Film Critics gave its best picture award to About Schmidt, and the New York Film Critics Circle chose Far From Heaven. Frida garnered a Golden Globe nomination for Salma Hayek as Best Actress and is on the American Film Institute’s list of "10 most outstanding achievements" in the film year.

Business Strategies projects a $3.4B U.S. box office total for independent films in 2002, 37% of the $9B total U.S. box office projected by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). Once again we see the worldwide revenues for indies easily topping $7B.