My Big Fat Greek Wedding

My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002) is about Toula, thirty, working in her family's restaurant, who falls for a man who is not Greek. That is the whole problem: the family will not accept an outsider, and Toula wants a life of her own for the first time. It began as a one woman stage show. Nia Vardalos wrote it from her own life, a Greek family in Winnipeg and a marriage to a non Greek man. Rita Wilson saw the show and, with the company she runs with her husband Tom Hanks, Playtone, took the project on. The result is one of the strangest commercial stories in cinema: made for five million dollars, it grossed 368.7 million worldwide and remains the highest grossing romantic comedy domestically. The return on investment came to around 6,150 percent. It stayed in cinemas unusually long and grew by word of mouth. A television series followed in 2003 and two sequels in 2016 and 2023. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Original Screenplay. It runs 95 minutes. Good for: family comedy, stories about cultural identity, and low stakes romance. Less good for: the Greek family stereotypes are thick and repetitive, and most of the jokes are variations on one idea. His family is barely written, and the conflict resolves without ever being genuinely tested.