Danish producer Regner Grasten has proved once again, with the release of Anja & Viktor through BVI, that he runs the most successful Danish production company when it comes to local box office performance.

Graesten's Regner Graesten Filmproduction (RGF), established in 1984, produced the musical romantic comedy, a sequel to 1999 box office hit Love At First Hiccough (total gross $2.98m), which seems likely to beat both its predecessor as well as all other comers, both domestic and international, this year. Anja & Viktor has already passed 400,000 admissions, and is still going strong.

"While Nordisk sold 1.6m tickets for their local productions during the 1990's, we managed to sell 4m tickets during the same period", Grasten says, "and two of our films, Love At First Hiccough and Anja & Victor, are among the top five highest grossers for the first 10 days in Denmark, ever. Anja & Victor also is the highest opener, ever ($966,628 three-day opening)".

Grasten takes particular pleasure in beating off the competition from Jurassic Park III which opened with a three-day weekend of $339,306 from Aug 10. Much of the success can be related to the massive print run the film was released on. "Due to support from the Danish Film Institute, which covers 50% of all print costs, we decided to give the film a huge release on 101 screens and it still did not seem enough" says Grasten, "There was not a single ticket available for Anja & Viktor over the last weekend. There are still admissions of between 10,000 and 12,000 every day and even though we spent DKR2.2m ($0.26m) on marketing, most of the success, I believe, can be ascribed to the word-of-mouth."

Up until now Grasten had remained fiercely independent and kept distribution of his productions within RGF. With Anja & Viktor he has turned to BVI. "We are only two people working in the company, and handling the technical distribution of 101 prints seemed to be impossible. We therefore made a long-term deal with BVI. While we remain responsible for the marketing of this and future films, Buena Vista will handle the technical side of the distribution, and the Scandinavian releases".