Michael Mosca might well be last year’s upstart genius of Canadian distribution. Or just plain lucky.

Giving cause for such debate is My Big Fat Greek Wedding, a modest romantic comedy with a worldwide box office of more than US$278 million, giving it bragging rights as the most successful indie film and romantic comedy of all time. Mosca, senior VP and COO of distributor/producer Equinox Films, had the good sense to snap up the Canadian rights to the movie, which went on to gross more than $26 million in this country alone and in effect establish Equinox as a distribution player.

‘We got lucky,’ Mosca offers on the line from Equinox’s Montreal headquarters.

Mosca first saw the movie at the American Film Market in Santa Monica last February. He admits he had never heard of the production or the one-woman show it was based on, nor even Nia Vardalos, the movie’s writer and star.

‘We went to the screening because I thought the title was funny,’ he recalls. ‘Being Italian, it easily could have been My Big Fat Italian Wedding. It could have been any ethnic thing. I immediately fell in love with it and felt it had potential in Canada.’

He soon learned, however, that a more established distributor had already put in an offer with sales agent Gold Circle Films, which is also 50% producer along with HBO, MPH Entertainment and Playtone Pictures. Undeterred, Mosca doubled the offer and the rest, as they say, is sleeper hit history. Now Equinox had to figure out just what to do with its latest acquisition. Despite his affection for MBFGW, Mosca admits ‘We all thought the film was a video/TV film.’

The best move Equinox made was none, at first. It held off on a theatrical release until it could measure the comedy’s appeal south of the border, where it was released by IFC Films, a young outfit with credits including the critically lauded Y Tu Mama Tambien and The Business of Strangers. IFC opened the film April 19 on 108 screens – a modest number – but perhaps buoyed by Tom Hanks’ association as one of the producers, the film enjoyed a per-screen average of US$5,531, second highest for that weekend. From there, positive word of mouth spread like wildfire.

In Canada, exhibitors Cineplex Odeon, Famous Players and AMC Theatres recommended that Mosca wait until late July or early August for a release, after the furor over the likes of Spider-Man, which opened on a whopping 245 Canuck screens, had died down. Heeding that advice, Equinox decided to delay even longer, using the publicity surrounding Toronto’s annual ‘A Taste of the Danforth’ Greek street festival (Aug. 9-11) as a springboard.

Equinox also brought in Vardalos and costar John Corbett (Sex in the City) to do press tours in Montreal and Toronto. There was a benefit with Vardalos in her hometown of Winnipeg, and specially targeted preview screenings were used to build buzz north of the 49th.

‘[Equinox] did a very smart marketing and promotional program through the Greek communities and the Greek churches,’ notes Adina Lebo, executive director of the Motion Picture Theatre Associations of Canada.

Meanwhile, Canuck moviegoers were hearing plenty of talk about this indie phenom, which shot in Toronto in 2001, and which, by the time of its Aug. 16 release here had already collected more than US$52 million in American receipts.

‘[A Greek acquaintance] was telling me that she got a phone call from her cousin in Mississippi who said ‘You have to see this movie,” Lebo recalls.

The Canadian debut on 102 screens was proportionately large compared to the U.S. opening, speaking to the hype that had compounded and Equinox’s faith in the film.

‘People thought we might be going too wide too fast based on the U.S.,’ Mosca says. ‘That’s a gamble we took that paid off.’

That it did: MBFGW debuted in the fifth spot at the Canadian box office with almost US$1 million in receipts and the week’s highest per-screen average at US$9,486. While most distributors aim for a monster opening weekend only to see their films quickly trail off from the big screen to pay-per-view, airplanes and video shelves, this was the rare film that had legs.

Number six in ’02

A couple of weeks after its opening, MBFGW was playing on 146 screens as the top film in the land (a spot it would occupy for four weeks), then on 172 screens, 181, 185, 196, maxing out at 200. The film placed sixth on Playback’s domestic box-office list for 2002, behind five blockbusters with an average budget of US$112 million and huge marketing pushes. That the US$5-million MBFGW could compete with the Big Boys is as much a feel-good story as the film itself, which tells the story of an insecure Greek girl who finds a Waspy Mr. Right despite her parents’ insistence she marry a ‘nice Greek boy.’

Mosca says Equinox spent $1.5 million on P&A upon the film’s initial release. That figure grew to nearly $2.8 million, with more prints needed along with more media ads to sustain the film during its staggering 16-week top-10 run.

‘A lot of people would say it’s easy to market a film that already had some buzz from the U.S.,’ Mosca acknowledges. ‘But regardless of what the U.S. does, you still have to sell your product up here and make people here feel that it’s a happening.’

Mosca has never had a hit anywhere near these proportions since he began heading the distributor in 1996, and for that matter neither has Equinox in its lifespan as the filmed entertainment division of 71-year-old La Compagnie France Film. The senior VP doesn’t expect to see another MBFGW anytime soon.

Case in point is the feature Between Strangers, an ensemble drama that Equinox felt held great promise, featuring an international cast including Sophia Loren, Gerard Depardieu, Malcolm McDowell, Pete Postlethwaite, Mira Sorvino and Deborah Kara Unger. Despite a big push from the distributor, including a retail tie-in with Holt Renfrew, the film vanished off Canadian screens shortly after it arrived.

‘Although the box office wasn’t wonderful, it did give us a certain amount of exposure and publicity,’ Mosca says, adding that he anticipates the five Genie nominations the film has received will bolster video rentals.

Meanwhile, Equinox has partnered with Warner Home Video to help handle MBFGW’s Canadian video release, slated for Feb. 11, not coincidentally just prior to Valentine’s Day.

Another Equinox release that has Mosca excited is the forthcoming $5-million Canuck feature Mambo Italiano, an adaptation of Steve Gallucio’s comedic play about a young gay couple trying to stay in the closet in a tight-knit Italian community. The Cinemaginaire production is directed by Emile Goudreault (Nuit de noces) and stars up-and-comer Luke Kirby (Lost and Delirious), Ginette Reno, Paul Sorvino and Mary Walsh. It is hardly surprising that it has similar plot points to MBFGW.

‘We think it’s a great comedy that’s also for the mass audience,’ Mosca enthuses. ‘But it’s not fair to put pressure on Mambo Italiano to perform at $27 million. If it does in the $5 [million] to $10 [million] range we’ll be ecstatic. It could give us a measuring stick as to what MBFGW would have done in Canada [had it been] fully Canadian without a U.S. release.’

Meanwhile, Mosca isn’t allowing a great year to get to his head.

‘On [MBFGW] we rolled the dice – it worked to our advantage – and that’s why we’re keeping our feet on the ground,’ he says. ‘Tomorrow’s another film and another day.’ *

-www.equinoxefilms.com