Fat Greek Wedding swallows Signs The low-budget comedy is No 1 for the first time in its 20-week run

Arthur J Pais

The amazing My Big Fat Greek Wedding ate up Signs Tuesday as it climbed to the top of the box-office charts in North America for the first time in its 20-week run. If the figures hold good for rest of the week, the low-budget comedy could topple the current box-office leader Signs, which was produced for about $70 million, the coming weekend.

Wedding, playing in about 1,600 movie theatres (less than half of the Signs count), grossed $1,027,000 Tuesday, taking its total to $83.6 million. Signs, which dipped for the first below $1 million mark in its five-week long run, harvested about $875,000, with its total gross reaching $196.5 million.

Though many critics complained Wedding was a ho-hum movie with plenty of ethnic jokes about Chicago's Greek Orthodox Christian community and not-so-graceful digs at Anglo Saxon Protestants, audiences of all kinds have embraced the story of a not-so-young-woman finding her own happiness on her own terms.

The movie, which was made for $3.5 to $5 million, with Tom Hanks and his Greek-American wife Rita Wilson as its co-producers, was expected to gross about $10 million following its first two weeks' good run. Box-office pundits then revised the estimate to $50 million.

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But as the movie continued to draw full house audiences in many theatres on the weekends, and IFC, its distributor, kept adding on more theatres, the estimate was recently revised to $100 million.

Now, with another expansion around the corner, and Wedding in more than 2,000 aisles across America, the film could easily reach $120 million. That gross will be much more than Hanks' Road To Perdition, which is ending its first run in America with about $105 million.

Wedding, which has emerged one of the most profitable movies ever made, hasn't yet opened in key markets abroad. Most American comedies do moderate business abroad. But Hollywood insiders feel that My Big Fat Greek Wedding, despite its ethnic concerns, offers such an embracing story about a daughter and her parents that it could be as big (if not bigger) abroad as it is in America.