Movie News & Gossip

BIRMINGHAM, Mich. - Tim Allen is one of America's favorite comics.

He's the guy who parlayed years of standup into the top-rated "Home Improvement" sitcom and "The Santa Clause" and "Galaxy Quest" films.

Sleepers come seemingly out of nowhere. They are the little films that confound expectations, attracting enthusiastic audiences that happily spread the word. Sometimes they come from the studio system, produced almost as an afterthought, but mostly they're produced well off the radar. On occasion, they upend the established order by opening at No. 1 at the boxoffice. But more typically they start small, building over time, hanging on in theaters as more heralded movies come and go. Often the filmmakers involved meet with initial rejection before wildly triumphing in the end. And in the process, they expose the limitations of Hollywood's conventional thinking about what makes a hit. Sleepers, when everyone wakes up to their potential, tend to be wildly successful, resulting in boxoffice returns that dwarf their modest budgets. And so, top sleepers of the past decade, take another bow.

10. "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" (Sony Pictures Classics, 2000)
Budget: $17 million
Domestic gross: $128 million

Except for a handful of martial arts fans, "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" was indeed hidden from sight during its production. Most Westerners weren't familiar with stars Chow Yun-Fat and Michelle Yeoh. Taiwanese director Ang Lee, coming off the commercial failure of "Ride With the Devil," wasn't exactly known for burning up the boxoffice, either. Even its rollout was uneventful: "Tiger" was first shown out of competition at the Festival de Cannes and made its U.S. premiere at the Hawaii International Film Festival. But after an Oscar-qualifying run in December 2000, it opened wide Jan. 12, 2001, to $8.6 million. And then, the subtitled movie became a sensation. While it never made more than $10.5 million during a single boxoffice weekend, it clawed its way to a $128 million domestic cume. It became the highest-grossing foreign-language film in U.S. history, won the Oscar for best foreign-language film, made an international star of Zhang Ziyi and ushered in an Asian movie revival in the West.