A little girl determined to win a beauty pageant, convinces her dysfunctional family to take a cross-country road trip. They travel in a VW wagon with the mom, the unsuccessful dad, the silent brother, druggie grandfather, and suicidal uncle to California for the Little Miss Sunshine pageant. Olive, the girl, doesn’t end up winning but the family learns to love each other’s quirks along the way. I’ve seen this movie and I love it. Abigial Breslin is Olive Hoover, Greg Kinnear is Richard Hoover the dad, Paul Dano, Dwayne the brother, Alan Arkin, Granpa Edwin Hoover, Toni Collete, Sheryl Hoover, and Steve Carell the uncle, Frank Ginsberg. Directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris. Produced by Marc Turtletaub, David T. Friendly, Peter Saraf, Albert Berger and Ron Yerxa.
Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris are husband and wife. This is not Dayton’s first project, but before Little Miss Sunshine he did mostly music videos and biographies on musicians. So it is his first time directing a motion picture. Dayton and is wife are from Alameda County in California and Dayton went to school at UCLA and was a film and television student. The Film was produced by Big Beach Films for 8 million.
Little Miss Sunshine played at the Sundance film festival where it was picked up by Fox Searchlight Pictures. Fox offered $10.5 million for the film after it hadn’t even been out a day. In the history of the festival this was one of the largest deals ever made. It also went to the Palm Springs International Film Festival, ad the Deauville Film Festival. It is now out on DVD through Fox Searchlight.
Reviews of this movie can be found here.
And the official website can be found here.
The film was hailed as a throwback to the 70’s style of comedy. A press release can be found here also.
In the U.S. the film grossed $59,891,098. Internationally the film was a success as well earning $40,473,828 overall. It earned $4 million in Spain, $5 million in Australia, $3 million in Germany, and $6 million when adding the UK, Ireland and Malta together. The film was seen by audiences as embracing the innocence of childhood while exploring the meaning of life for the older generation. It resonated with all the people who have one time owned a VW bus. The film was released on DVD December 19, 2006. The most recent figure for DVD sales is $55,516,832.
The film had such a great poster. It was yellow with the bus and the people running to get it. The yellow really caught the attention of the audience. The film used its website, posters and trailers to create an effective marketing strategy that would be seen by many. They would post the posters in malls and other places that would attract a lot of attention to draw a large audience.
The filmmakers used the angle of family to market the film. It was meant to show a dysfunctional family and what they go through and how they work together. It was a major plot point and definitely a major draw for viewers to the movie. It was also marketed as a road trip movie, to connect with the viewers who were less into family films. I think that they were very successful with their angles. I know that I wanted to see it when I heard about it and I did and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I would have maybe played more upon the actors that were in it, because some of them were big names and could have drawn in more people who are attached to a particular actor.
