For all their extensive marketing research and expertise, the Hollywood studios continue to be taken unawares by the ticket-buying public who regularly choose to stay away from heavily-touted blockbusters and give their allegiance instead to much more modest productions.
Since it opened in August, George Of The Jungle has flabbergasted film industry observers with its steady progress which has seen it pass the $100 million mark in US takings alone - only 12 movies have achieved a nine-figure gross at the US box office this year. The movie's modest roots are in a mildly cultish animated cartoon series which ran on ABC Television in the late 1960s.
In essence a Tarzan spoof, it had as its motif the clumsy, navigationally challenged George swinging from a vine - and crashing headlong into a tree. "Look at it this way," says Brendan Fraser, who plays the eponymous vine-swinger in George Of The Jungle. "There have been 80 or 90 Tarzan movies, and isn't it odd that he swings from vine to vine so perfectly in every one of them and never once crashes into a tree."
The movie makes for good-humoured slapstick entertainment with a keen sense of the absurd, and Brendan Fraser remains admirably deadpan throughout, even when he's talking about his faithful dog, Shep - who happens to be an elephant. His other friends are Ape, the wise, highly intelligent gorilla who raised him and is his surrogate parent, and Tookie-Tookie Bird, a toucan.
Their idyllic jungle existence is disrupted by the arrival of two Americans on safari - the heiress, Ursula Stanhope (Leslie Mann) whose hair remains perfectly permed in primitive conditions, and her patronising stuff-shirt fiance, Lyle Van De Groot (Thomas Haden Church). Never having seen a woman before, George is puzzled by her shape and observes that she's "a funny looking fellow". When George finds himself attracted to her, Ape proffers the trashy novel, Coffee, Tea Or Me? as a guide to courtship rituals.
The knowing, self-referential tone of the humour - which clearly helped the movie's crossover appeal to adults as well as children - involves a narrator referring to one scene, for example, as a "waterfall set"; a jungle porter speaking to camera on the subject of classic comedy; and Shep the elephant deciding to dispense with a bone for a re-take. The later stages of the movie mine the successful fish-out-of-water territory of Crocodile Dundee when Ursula brings George to San Francisco.
"I'm deliriously happy with the movie's success", Brendan Fraser declared over coffee in his Dublin hotel on a dull Monday morning last month. "We had high hopes for it, and I had faith that it would find its audience, but we never dreamed it would become a runaway hit like this.
"I loved the word-play in the old cartoon series of George and its really subversive sense of humour. But I had to treat the material as straight-ahead drama, or we would have lost it." His one regret is that he has never met John Cleese, who provides the distinctive voice of Ape in the movie. "I must meet him sometime soon," he says. "I feel like I know him. He raised me!"
Brendan Fraser himself was raised all over the world. Now 28, he was born in Minneapolis and he moved with his family as his father's work as a Canadian tourism official dictated - to Cincinnati and Ottawa, in Europe to Holland, Germany, Switzerland and England, and back to Canada where he graduated from high school in Toronto and attended the Cornish College of the Arts Actors Conservatory in Seattle. He finally settled in the heart of the movie business, in Los Angeles.
His film debut came with a supporting role in Nancy Savoca's Dogfight, which starred River Phoenix and Lili Taylor, followed by a leading role in the dire would-be comedy Encino Man (released here as California Man), playing the eponymous frozen caveman who is dug up and defrosted by a teenage nerd played by shrill Pauly Shore. Much more demanding and satisfying was the starring role as a Jewish scholarship boy facing anti-Semitism at a preppy boarding school in the 1950s in School Ties.
"We had a very good young cast and we've all done very well since," citing his co-stars Matt Damon, Chris O'Donnell and Ben Afleck. He enthusiastically reports a really hot Hollywood buzz on Gus Van Sant's imminent Good Will Hunting, which Damon and Afleck wrote and in which they co-star with Robin Williams and Minnie Driver.
"I felt we all lived those parts in School Ties," he says. "I had gone to boys' boarding schools, so I had seen a lot of those aspects of schoolboy life played out. The story had a strong social resonance. It was also a very important experience for me to make it because it was the very film to really establish me as an actor." He followed it with a number of unremarkable movies - With Honors, Airheads, The Scout, Mrs Winterbourne - before firmly re-establishing himself on the Hollywood map with George Of The Jungle.
Given that he spends most of that movie wearing only a loincloth, Brendan Fraser underwent a rigid workout regime which burned off his body-fat and gave him the toned physique one would expect from any self-respecting, vine-swinging jungle king. "I had a routine that any athlete would have," he says. "I did it for six to eight months - jumping, rolling, swinging, hiking, swimming all day long."
He followed George Of The Jungle with two low-budget independent pictures. In the intriguing-sounding Gods And Monsters he fulfils a long-time ambition of working with Ian McKellen. "He's my hero," he says. "I wanted so much to be in his Richard III, but the casting director wouldn't let me near the project. I wrote Ian a letter saying `I'll carry your suitcase', and he replied very kindly."
Gods And Monsters takes its title from a line in James Whale's classic 1935 horror movie, The Bride Of Frankenstein, and it features Ian McKellen as James Whale. "Whale was a genius," says Fraser, "but he was ultimately run out of Hollywood due to envy for his talent, I think, and because he was openly gay. He had a stroke late in life and died in a swimming pool, apparently due to suicide, but the circumstances of his death are still shadowy."
The film, which is set mostly in the later years of Whale's life, features Fraser as a former soldier whom Whale hires as his gardener. "He invites me into his parlour, like the spider to the fly," says Fraser, "and he sees me as the creature from Frankenstein. We've recreated the lab in a dream sequence." But this is not a horror movie, he insists, even though it's produced by Clive Barker and the director is Bill Condon who made Candyman 2: Farewell To The Flesh.
Brendan Fraser also has completed Still Breathing, written and directed by documentary-maker Jim Robinson. "It's a romance about destiny and envisaging one's soul-mate," says the actor. "It's set in San Antonio, Texas, and I play a street performer who dreams of his dream girl and instinctively feels he has to go Formosa to find her. Then, in Los Angeles, he's changing planes - and he meets her at the Formosa Cafe!" She's played by Joanna Going from Inventing The Abbotts, and the cast also features veteran Celeste Holm.
Busy Brendan Fraser next month starts work on The Blast From The Past, which begins in 1962, when a professor is making a fortune on patents until the Cuban Missile Crisis intervenes. "He goes to a bomb shelter with his wife," explains Fraser, "he sets the timelock and they end up living there for 30 years. And they have a child - me - who is sent out in search of supplies when the 30 years are up. It's a fish out of water story - again! And it's a comedy. I hope!"
First, Brendan Fraser has the important matter of a wedding - his own. He's about to marry actress Afton Smith, who accompanied him on his visit to Dublin. She has a cameo in George Of The Jungle, in a scene where some San Francisco socialites are ogling George. "I'm the chief ogler," she insisted when she linked up with her fiance at their Dublin hotel.
George Of The Jungle is released nationwide on December 19th