Billy Elliot is already being tipped for Oscar success - after taking nearly £3 million in its first week.
The film, starring Julie Walters and 14-year-old newcomer Jamie Bell, cost only £2.9 million to make. It isn't expected to be another Four Weddings And A Funeral in the US, where it opens on Friday, but the influential Hollywood trade paper, Daily Variety, says in a front-page article that it could become the most significant British film since the Hugh Grant hit. "There haven't been so many firsts and breakthroughs bound up in a single Brit pic since Four Weddings led the way out of the British film industry's early Nineties gloom," Daily Variety says. Universal Studios is already planning an Oscar push for the movie, set during the 1984 miners' strike, about a boy who dreams of going to the Royal Ballet School.
