If you look at some of the highest grossing movies of 2024, you might notice just how high the stakes are in their plots:
There's the fate of the world in Godzilla Kong: The New Empire, the fate of multiple worlds in Dune Part 2, and the fate of a... comic book universe.... (or something) In Deadpool and Wolverine.But if you go back to the films of 1999, like we've been doing over the past year, you'll find a good number of stories where the stakes were only as high as "Getting laid before graduation." Those of course, are the words of high school senior Kevin making a pact with his friends Jim, Finch and Oz in the teen classic American Pie. And the obsession with sex wasn't limited to stories about white kids.
In The Wood, released the same year about 3 Black high school juniors, Mike, Slim and Roland, who had the same thing on their minds.
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A hormonal era.
To put it simply, horny teenagers were just about everywhere on screen that year. In 10 Things I Hate About You, rich jerk Joey was willing to pay the cool outsider, played by a young Heath Ledger, to date the sister of the girl he wanted to get with.
And there were the twisted mind games two step siblings played in Cruel Intentions.
Whitney Friedlander, an entertainment journalist living in Los Angeles, says the prior success of films like Clueless, and Romeo and Juliet proved to studios that teenagers were a powerful ticket buying force.
"You also had the advantage of having smaller studios like MTV films that were looking at these films and being like, we can make all these movies to an underserved market," Friedlander told NPR.Many of these films were also based on classic texts whose rights were in the public domain, which made them cheaper to license. 10 Things was inspired by the Shakespeare comedy The Taming of the Shrew. Cruel Intentions came from the French 18th century novel Dangerous Liaisons.
25 years later.
Like many raunchy comedies in the '80s and '90s, American Pie was made primarily with white teenage boys in mind. But one of the most memorable characters in the film introduced herself with that one famous line about band camp.That was Michelle, who turns out to not be such a geek after all. She's played by Alyson Hannigan, who by the time American Pie came out was already starring in the hit TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She says her reaction to the project was immediately positive.
"I remember first being sent the script from my my manager at the time, and he prefaced it by saying, 'You're either going to love it or hate it. There's really no in between', Hannigan told NPR.
"And and I loved it. I absolutely loved it. It made me laugh out loud. And I remember just reading it very quickly because I enjoyed it so thoroughly. And I adored Michelle. I thought as soon as I sort of started reading her lines, I could hear her voice in my head. And I knew that that's the part I wanted to audition for."
And as for any regrets or cringe moments she experiences looking back?
"I mean, as a parent, probably the entire movie, because I'm now looking at it through the lens of like, 'I have a teenage daughter whose friends will most likely watch this and then tell her about it.' And I'm dreading that day. I've been dreading that day probably since I got pregnant, but I'm also not at all sorry. I love it. And I'll just have to have to deal with that when that comes about."
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