Of course, playability hardly comes easily. An effective word-of-mouth effort requires hours of unglamorous work staging screenings for groups such as the Boys Club, the Sierra Club and AARP, and creative, unconventional thinking, like dragging Al Gore to meet with executives at Wal-Mart to secure better placement for the film's DVD.
One glimpse of movies in the works -- "Shrek the Third," "Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer," "Rush Hour 3," "Ocean's Thirteen" -- also shows that studios are as interested in marketability as originality. But if there's one thing Hollywood loves more than anything, it's fat profit margins, and although some sequels make handfuls of money, they invariably cost a fortune to produce and an almost equal sum to market.
Although Fox Searchlight won't predict how many tickets "Little Miss Sunshine" may eventually sell, the company has run internal comparisons to several recent word-of-mouth successes and has found that the comedy is outpacing the breakouts "March of the Penguins," "Napoleon Dynamite," "Garden State" and "The Full Monty."
People who worked on "Little Miss Sunshine" say peer recommendations have even greater power these days because moviegoers are being turned off by the wall-to-wall marketing campaigns that accompany most studio releases.
"People seem to be saying that they'd rather have the court of public opinion help make their decisions about what to see rather than the marketing department," says another of the film's producers, Marc Turtletaub, who personally bankrolled the $8-million "Little Miss Sunshine," which sold at this year's Sundance Film Festival for a record $10.5 million. "There is also a satisfaction in discovering movies themselves, that you can come to the film rather than have the movie forced on you."
It's not just headline-making releases such as "Little Miss Sunshine" that are benefiting from so many friendly endorsements. One small movie would not even have received a theatrical deal had it not been for glowing audience reaction. After director Susan Seidelman and her mother, Florence, collaborated on "Boynton Beach Club," a retirement home romantic comedy about widows, widowers and new beginnings, no one would sign on to distribute the movie, even after the film drew packed houses at film festivals.
"We had a film that audiences were telling us they liked, but still no buyer," director Seidelman says. "We decided we weren't going to give up."
