Little Miss Sunshine, a 2006 American comedy-drama road film, was the directorial film debut of the husband-wife team of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris. The screenplay was written by first-time writer Michael Arndt. The movie stars Greg Kinnear, Steve Carell, Toni Collette, Paul Dano, Abigail Breslin and Alan Arkin, and was produced by Big Beach Films on a budget of $8 million. Filming began on June 6, 2005 and took place over 30 days in Arizona and Southern California.

 

The motley six-member Hoover family treks from Albuquerque to the Little Miss Sunshine pageant in Redondo Beach, California, to fulfill the deepest wish of 7-year-old Olive, an ordinary little girl with big dreams. Along the way the family must deal with crushed dreams, heartbreaks, and a broken-down VW bus, leading up to the surreal Little Miss Sunshine competition itself. On their travels through this bizarrely funny landscape, the Hoovers learn to trust and support each other along the path of life, no matter what the challenge.

 

The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 20, 2006, and its distribution rights were bought by Fox Searchlight Pictures for one of the biggest deals made in the history of the festival. The film had a limited release in the United States on July 26, 2006, and later expanded to a wider release starting on August 18.

 

The film received positive reviews by critics. The review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reported that 91% of critics gave the film a positive rating, based on 205 reviews, with an average score of 7.7/10. Michael Medved gave Little Miss Sunshine four stars (out of four) saying that "... this startling and irresistible dark comedy counts as one of the very best films of the year ..." and that directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, the movie itself, and actors Alan Arkin, Abigail Breslin, and Steve Carell deserved Oscar nominations. Joel Siegel issued a rarely awarded 'A' rating, saying that "Orson Welles would have to come back to life for this not to make my year-end Top 10 list." Stella Papamichael of BBC News called the film "a winning blend of sophistication and silliness". USA Today's Claudia Puig commented on Breslin's depiction of Olive Hoover, "If Olive had been played by any other little girl, she would not have affected us as mightily as it did."

 

Little Miss Sunshine received critical acclaim and had an international box office gross of $100.5 million. The film was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and won two: Best Original Screenplay for Michael Arndt and Best Supporting Actor for Alan Arkin. It also won the Independent Spirit Award for Best Feature and received numerous other accolades.