Not Another Teen Movie (2001): The Spoof That Retired the Genre It Mocked

The film’s most talked-about moment comes at the airport. Jake Wyler, played by Chris Evans, races to stop the girl he has wronged from leaving. In the middle of that scene stands a flight attendant played by Molly Ringwald, the face of John Hughes’s teen films of the 1980s. Not Another Teen Movie casts her as a sort of oracle who has seen how these stories end. The in-joke is one of the film’s smartest.

Joel Gallen’s 2001 comedy opened in US theaters on December 14, 2001, from Columbia Pictures. Gallen was making his feature debut after a career in music television. The film is a send-up of the teen movies of the preceding two decades. Ringwald’s cameo ties it back to the source material, and critics have argued about it ever since.

A plot assembled from other plots

The story follows a template that anyone who watched teen comedies in the late 1990s will know. Jake, the school’s golden-boy quarterback, makes a bet with a rival quarterback, Austin (Eric Christian Olsen). Jake will turn an unpopular, glasses-wearing art student, Janey Briggs (Chyler Leigh), into prom queen. The skeleton comes mainly from She’s All That. It also borrows from 10 Things I Hate About You, Can’t Hardly Wait, Pretty in Pink and Varsity Blues.

Five writers share the screenplay credit: Michael G. Bender, Adam Jay Epstein, Andrew Jacobson, Phil Beauman and Buddy Johnson. Neal H. Moritz produced through Original Film.

A school where everyone announces who they are

The school is called John Hughes High, and the film’s best idea is to make the genre’s unwritten rules visible. In Little White Lies, David Ehrlich noted a banner reading “Welcome, prospective cliques” and a football jersey labeled “Extra”. He also noted a stadium scoreboard that counts the concussions a player has suffered. Characters label themselves as they would in the movies being mocked. That makes the satire about the way genres sort people into types, not only about specific films.

The cast plays it straight. Evans gets the vain, sardonic quarterback. Jaime Pressly is the jilted girlfriend, Priscilla. Mia Kirshner plays Jake’s sister, Catherine, and Randy Quaid plays Janey’s father. Josh Radnor plays the school’s orientation guide. Casting also did some of the joking. The late Paul Gleason returned as Richard Vernon, the disciplinarian from The Breakfast Club. Ron Lester played Reggie Ray, a football player close to the one he played in Varsity Blues. Mr. T appears as the Wise Janitor.

Ringwald at the airport

Ringwald plays the Flight Attendant in the finale at the airport. Variety, reviewing the film in December 2001, thought the cameo went wrong. It said she was made to fire cheap shots at the only films she is remembered for. Later writers disagree. Little White Lies called her late-game appearance as a wise flight attendant “just the tip of the iceberg” of the film’s casting. Both views fit the film. The cameo shows Gallen’s instinct to borrow the original stars’ credibility, and it is still the moment most viewers recall.

Craft and sound

The film is a broad comedy, and its craft was never its selling point. Reynaldo Villalobos shot it, Theodore Shapiro wrote the score, and Florence-Isabelle Megginson designed the costumes. Variety judged the technical work “just adequate”. The soundtrack follows the genre’s logic. It brings back New Wave hits familiar from the Hughes films, but newer pop bands re-recorded them. A vinyl edition of the soundtrack was issued for the film’s 25th anniversary.

Reception, then and now

Critics were unkind at first. Variety called the comic ammunition feeble and the staging routine, though it picked out Pressly, Olsen and Evans for praise. The film did find an audience. It earned $37.9 million at the US box office, according to Rotten Tomatoes, and about $66.5 million worldwide against a reported $15 million budget.

The reappraisal has been more generous. Ehrlich’s 2015 piece argued that the film “lingers like a promise”. His case was that teen comedies that followed, such as Mean Girls, Easy A and The Duff, could not play the genre straight again and had to address how high school stories work. That is a large claim for a lowbrow spoof, but it explains why the film is still discussed.

It also belongs to Evans’s story. Ehrlich’s article starts from a point Evans himself has joked about: this was his first leading role and his big break. He went on to play Captain America.

Where to watch

Streaming availability changes by region. Recent listings show it on free ad-supported services in the US, including Tubi and Pluto TV. It is also widely available to rent or buy digitally, and on disc.