10 Brilliant Movies That Surprised Everyone

Low budget movies have broken big at the box office before, but few in such dramatic fashion as Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris’ 2006 game changer. In the wake of Little Miss Sunshine’s overwhelming success, the floodgates were opened to charming, colourful, slightly twee indie movies. And while a lot of these were absolutely terrible, that’s not Little Miss Sunshine’s fault.

The delightful family road trip comedy made over ten times its budget at the box office, and was a triumph at the Oscars, with Michael Arndt and Alan Arkin nabbing gongs for the screenplay and supporting turn as a heroin-sniffing grandad respectively.

Following this glory, indie companies across the land were pining for the next Sunshine, with Fox Searchlight (who distributed the movie) responsible for several of them. From Juno to (500) Days Of Summer, the subsequent heavily stylised indies ran the gamut of quality, but for a while, they all turned a buck.

Little Miss Sunshine demonstrated the public’s appetite for talky, charming original ideas, and while audiences were perhaps overfed in the aftermath, it remains a delight.