Ok, we admit it. We’re a little sick of this movie and the whole story and yes, we’ve said it before, but if there was any question before, “Juno” is now officially a bonafide phenomenon.
The soundtrack which debuted within the top 10, slowly crawled up the Billboard album charts and today hit number 1 with 68,000 copies sold in the last week, becoming Rhino Records’ highest charting album ever (surely boosted by the recent Oscar noms, more below; next week’s slows release schedule looks unlikely to knock it off its perch either).
The Moldy Peaches’ song from the soundtrack, “Anyone Else But You” is doing so incredibly well that they’ve performed on “The View,” a video has been released to MTV and the song is now debuting as a ringtone.
Moreover, this past weekend the teen pregnancy comedy topped the $100 million mark in box-office receipts, far surpassing the two most successful indie comedies to date, “Sideways” ($71 million) and “Little Miss Sunshine” ($59 million). As we’ve regurgitated about a million times, “Juno” was made for a paltry $2.5 million dollars, so do the math – the film has now become one of the most profitable films ever made (certainly by indie standards it has outshined all others).
To add to all this, the comedy scored four Oscar nominations including one left-field nod for its director Jason Reitman that almost no one – not even the filmmaker himself expected (the news was even a shock to his producers!): “No one is more surprised than I am. When they announced my name, I just stopped short and was in a state of shock,” Reitman said sounding totally perplexed. “We ended up screaming so much my neighbor knocked on my door. My dad called me crying. He was so proud and so overcome.”
Also completely nuts is the fact that compared to the rest of the Best Picture nominees ( “Atonement,” “No Country For Old Men,” “There Will Be Blood,” and Michael Clayton”), “Juno” is the highest-grossing of all these films. The second highest grossing film ‘No Country,’ is barely at half ‘Juno’s total. There you have it phenom, totally official-like.