Mamma Mia! Summer's Swede Surprise?

A lot of critics are going to have a lot of fun pounding on Mamma Mia! ("I don't know who...thought Pierce Brosnan should sing in it/How on earth could it not - be - s**t?" wrote one British wag in Abba-style doggerel). The movie, however, is already skipping madly towards being a worldwide hit--to Universal Studios' obvious delight.

Over this past weekend, opening overseas first to catch a fair wind en route to its domestic release in some 2900 theaters this Friday, it raked in $24 million on just 1,368 screens. That's what one trade paper called a "stunning" $17,536 per-location average.

Stunning, perhaps to some of the action franchises that are also feasting on avid international business and may have thought they owned bragging rights in places such as the United Kingdom, where it was number one for the weekend with $13.1 million over the likes of Hancock (second at over $7 million).  The studio, which has been on a box-office tear since April,  has no such plan to upset the juggernaut opening Friday against them, The Dark Knight. But they plan to thrive alongside it.

Universal is said to be looking at an opening gross in the mid-20s and distribution head Nikki Rocco says, although modern release strategies aim to rake in the bulk of their revenue a.s.a.p., she's planning on a good deal of repeat business.

"We'll attract a family audience. You can get moms and daughters. Maybe dad will be dragged along, maybe he won't," she said. "But if you give 'em stuff they really have fun with, they're gonna come back to the movie theaters."

Lending reassurance was not only the overseas splash, but the thumping numbers the Mamma Mia! musical has amassed since it debuted in London in 1999. By 2004 it was reaching  a tally of over a billion in box office (that's since doubled),  based on more than $8 million a week in ticket sales, with 18,000 people watching the show every night in 11 productions that include long runs in Las Vegas, other U.S. cities, and Australia (where it was estimated one in every 10 Aussies had seen it) as well as Singapore, Japan, Germany and Korea.

I'll admit that not since being dragged to Sex In the City (which opened at $57 million against little competition earlier this summer, probably around double what Mamma will debut at), have I felt so distinctly unmacho in a movie house, laughing at certain hammy jokes and even getting a little misty at points. (Yes, when Brosnan croaks "S.O.S." like a man confessing on a waterboard, I found his duet with Meryl Streep touching.) "God bless him," said reviewer Hugo Rifkind, "He can't sing at all. "

My own liking for the film has much to do with the recently discovered Amanda Seyfried. Producer Gary Goetzman knew her well from her stint on Big Love, made by the Playtone Productions he co-heads with Tom Hanks.

"It should be beyond bonkers, it should be a mess," says Rifkind, adding, "It isn't", and for that seasoned producer Goetzman must be given much credit. He's helped steer such kindred properties as the Hanks-directed That Thing You Do and Playtone's through-the-roof money machine, My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

After Hanks and wife Rita Wilson had seen the Mamma Mia!  musical in London, Playtone made a bid along with a number of other would-be producers of a film offshoot,t  producer Judy Craymer, who like writer Caroline Johnson had gone from scuffling for rent money (Johnson) and West End stage seed money (Craymer) to considerable fortunes from the stage productions.

They, along with Abba songwriters Bjorn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson (who were already making around $50 million a year in royalties) were not readily convinced.

Goetzman's musical savvy and Hanks' good name played well. Goetzman kibitzed on the Abba team's sessions to re-record the original tracks--using the original Stockholm "band cats" and doing the tracks not quite note for note, but, according to Goetzman, the best tracks these songs have ever had" and then pushing to incorporate the outbursts of singing "as naturalistically as we could." That meant starting most of singing live on the set, often on location in the Greek islands, then finishing many of the tunes on sound stages at Pinewood Studios outside London.

Only with a picture so precisely aimed at a target audience could a studio talk blithely of whether it wanted to open against Hancock (Goetzman's original preference) or The Dark Knight. "Yes, that's going to be a huge movie," says Rocco, "It just seemed to fit as a good counter-programing film on that date."

If box-office history is made by a number north of a combined $200 million for this weekend's releases, Mamma Mia! will have played a big part in it.