20 Movies Way More Successful Than Anyone Expected

Napoleon Dynamite is pretty much the archetypal indie success story, with Jared Hess' $400,000 comedy premiering at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, where it was acquired by Fox Searchlight Pictures.

Despite being given a highly limited release that summer, the film's uniquely quirky sense of humour made it a hit with counter-culture types, serving as a welcome alternative to the slew of broad, generic comedies dominating multiplexes at the time.

Even so, few could've anticipated that Napoleon Dynamite would be anything more than a modest success, perhaps grossing $5 million and then disappearing from sight.

But it managed to stick around and became enough of a genuine oddball phenomenon in its own right that it ended its run at $46.1 million - more than 115x its production budget.

Since then Napoleon Dynamite has remained a popular cult film, with a line of merchandise and even a short-lived animated series - a basically unimaginable outcome for an aggressively weird indie comedy with no name actors.