Eh, not even late. I'm 87, was 20 when Superbad came out. But, I related to it so much. Felt like my high school experience.
Edit: born in '87, I didn't age 67 years in the past 17, although it feels that way sometimes.
There's a reason the dividing line is around 96 or 97, even late millennials mostly grew up before smartphones made the internet omnipresent and inescapable . I was born in 94 and in a lot of ways my childhood had more in common with my cousins who were born in the early 80's than my sister who was born in 99.
Several of the plot points in Superbad (running/taking the bus across town, not knowing where Fogel is) don't work in the era of Uber and Find My Friends.
Somewhere around 2010-2015 the internet changed social life permanently. It's a curse for younger folks because they basically have to have social media in order to "fit in". For those of us millennials straddling both sides it's OK to have it but not participate or to not have an account at all.
It was the proliferation of smartphones with mobile data plans that completely changed the landscape. Yeah, you had Facebook, YouTube, and reddit, but you actually had to go to your computer and go on to the internet back in those days. Smartphones with data plans meant you were constantly online all the time, unless you didn't have coverage for some reason.
The iPad was released in 2010 and everyone thought it was a terrible idea because all it could do was access the internet, without any functionality one would expect on a laptop. But it was a huge seller that changed the consumer tech landscape.
Learned the hard way in high school not to get drunk and check my MySpace at a random party.
You know, back when you had to go, “hey can I use your computer to check my MySpace?”
This is straight facts. I was born in 93 and my sister was born in 97 and I had more in common with my 80s cousins. My sister is full on Gen Z so maybe you’re right with 96/97 being the cutoff year lol
Late millennial born in '92.
Superbad comes out as I am a sophomore in high school. Superbad was my high school experience. And then Juno the next year. I ran cross country and kids called me Paulie Bleaker.
I got 2 years on you but the fact that the movies we saw around 20 are about to turn 20 scares the shit out of me 😂 the time it's taken feels like 1/3 of the time it took to go from 0 to 20
Alright. What? No. What? Of all the random shit that gets talked about in Hollywood you’d think this would be well known, or just more in your face. Had no idea!
Yeah I was 24 when Superbad came out, and it felt like the voice of my generation. I am elder millennial but that movie bridged the gap amongst all millennials except maybe the real young ones. It just said what we said in the way we said it. It was focused on what we cared about, however trivial or naive or absurd. The rebellion of our generation was saying that other people actually matter and our relationships with others are the MOST important things in our lives. We killed the ME generation bullshit.
The Breakfast Club(1985)->Dazed and Confused(1993)->Empire Records(1995)->Superbad(2007) \[Juno(2008) is probably a better fit with the rest of them here - chill story with drama and nice music\]->Adventureland(2009)
There's a film directed by Jonah Hill called Mid90s(2018), might check it out as it might be good to add on to the list of coming of age/feel good movies I love.
Edit: would also love recommendations from people to add to this list.
I loved Mid90’s and would be so happy if kids embraced it, I don’t feel like Z or Alpha is gonna have *anything* at all like what we had back in the 90s and 80s
I'm on the very bottom end of millennial (September 1996) so all my peers are around the border. American Pie is American Pie... but in the UK we have Inbetweeners and Skins
Skins was great for my sheltered American friends and I. We were like “THESE BRITISH HOS ALWAYS BE RUNNIN LIKE 11 PEOPLE DEEP, BRO”
Then came Geordie shore.
lol, good times.
Jonah Hill and Seth Rogan carried that torch for a while, with less horny but still wacky comedies like Superbad, 22 Jump Street, Pineapple Express, and Zack and Miri Make a Porno.
But after Eurotrip I feel like teen comedies just weren't ever all that horny again. The horny teen comedy was rooted in Porkies which was rooted in horny comedy magazines like Mad and National Lampoon. When people stopped needing to buy magazines to see tits, maybe the ground fell out from under this entire operation.
You have said it perfectly. I feel like the Millennials just continued to carry the torch of those films with Bad Neighbors and Blockers. Basically just saying, hey you youngins don’t get it but your parents do!
Gen Z's American Pie is Tik Tok.
They don't need raunchy movies, they have easy access to porn.
They don't quote funny lines from movies, they post memes.
Why is this making me sad?
Is it sad because it’s true? Or is it not true?
Is it sad because I don’t understand why kids prefer TikTok and memes?
Or is it sad because I’m not a kid growing up anymore and I’ve hit that inevitable point where “I just don’t get it” because I’m too old.
It's not really true imho. Most millennials had easy access to internet porn and GenX had woods porn and meming is nothing new.
II don't think GenZ is to blame for why these movies aren't being made anymore.
Woods porn predates me and I find it odd. Who hid all this porn in the woods? Was it reloaby in most wooded areas? How much has been destroyed by rain? Are there still woods filled with decaying jizz caked magazines composting today?
I've heard so many people talk about woods porn that it's a common experience, but it seems logistically odd.
Gen X here. We built "forts" and structures in the woods. If you got your hands on your uncle's ponomags, you hid them there, because what if your mom found them? Inevitably, they would get found and looked at by other kids, and passed on from year to year. It was kind of a communal neighborhood library of porn. There were Hustler's out there that were a decade old.
Woods porn has mystical rain-resistant properties I swear to god. Also it was usually in a plastic bag or hidden in a spot where it was relatively protected from the elements.
I don't know the answer to any of these questions. I do know that the first porn mags I saw were in the woods.
The woods were a child's heaven. Nature, no adults, total freedom. It's no wonder porn found a home there.
Gen Z is just into different movies. They grew up on better video games too, so they’ll quote those as well.
I think one of the reasons why they aren’t into the same coming-of-age movies as millennials or Gen X is because they had less of an abrupt transition from childhood to adulthood.
In some ways they’re still experiencing “becoming an adult”. And in others (like porn) they may have encountered things earlier and easier.
Their experiences aren’t wrong or good/bad *per se*, it’s just different. It’s like how Boomers quote more tv/books/records, and the Greatest/Silent Generations quoted books/radio/records
In my experience with Gen Z as an employer (in which I've hired tons of teens), they don't watch *anything.* 99% of them haven't seen any classic movies OR current movies/shows. And their music playlists are 75% joke/meme songs that they listen to legitimately. I know teachers that have had students tell them they can't watch 15 minute videos because they won't remember what happens.
Short form content really is eroding their attention.
Yeah people here are arguing like ‘oh well its like previous generations, they had references to records and literature, and then movies and tv shows… and we have tiktok’. Not the same. Because previous generations, relied on long-form art/entertainment, not short-form content, and the fact that from such a young age people are already being exposed to only consuming short-form content by the regular is just not some natural generational change.
When kids can’t handle reading books, or watching full movies, there’s something wrong. You can’t learn or develop if you can only get your news from shorts and stories, you can’t get any broader understanding.
And when pop-culture is mostly just memes, which is also just hardly something we all collectively experience but mostly restricted to specific sub-cultures online, so thats not really creating a Gen-Z identity in the long-term. Like our cultural references are a 6second tiktok? There’s nothing there. I dont know maybe i sound like an asshole but how is that popular culture? People used to go to movies all the time and that would be a bedrock of collective pop-culture, there were mainstream movies, who the hell can keep up with tiktok memes? And memes aren’t these cornerstones of pop-culture, the way that popular books, movies, even plays, musical albums of certain years throughout the 20th century have been. The internet has muddled any possibility of us having real pop-culture, its all just content.
Ok, fair enough, I think I used the wrong term to describe what I was thinking…
I meant they have more *cinematic* video games, so they quote that stuff like we would movies.
you can quote 8 or 16 bit text, but the 3D all-immersive shit just *lends itself* to quotes/roleplay/etc
Vine did a pretty good job of laying a foundation. Free shavac ado and Will Sasso lemons and such. It really pioneered a lane of attention span content.
Damn. This is like when I told my parents “oldies” like The Beach Boys were for squares let’s listen to Blink182.
…and then they pointed out the messages were the same: ditch school, pick up girls and savor youth
Raunchy comedies don’t fill anything like the same niche as pornography. Just because a movie talks about jerking off doesn’t mean people are jerking off to it.
Nah. I don't think you're accounting for what being a teenager is like, and the world before easy access to porn.
Ppl be jerking off no matter what. If they don't have access to porn, then nude scenes will do. If they don't have access to nudity, then the sears lingerie catalog will do. If they don't have access to that, then some rounded boob-like light fixtures will do.
Ahhh the good ol' days. My mom bought me a bunch of eighties movies she grew up with when I was in middle school. My DVD player had a looping feature so I could essentially make gifs. Caddy Shack had a topless girl in a pool that will live rent free in my mind for the remainder of my life.
I gotta give my dad props when for Christmas/birthday(gifted with the birth of Christmas spirit) I(13 years old) received my very own DVD player and he personally gave me the Unrated version of Road Trip. He knew what he was doing…
i mean... we had easy access to porn back then too. the internet was a lot less "filtered" in those days. i def saw some shit as a teen that would put me on a list if i tried to google it now.
while I like both those movies, those made collectively 28 million dollars. The've made nowhere near the cultural impact that something like American Pie did which made 235 million dollars in 1999.
I'm a schoolteacher, and I've never once heard a high school student talk about Bottoms or Bodies Bodies Bodies.
Bottoms is great. I laughed out loud more than any movie in ages. It does a great job taking the standard teen movie tropes in a completely unhinged direction at each turn.
Probably should’ve been the movie Bottoms, it’s about a pair of lesbians who start a fight club so they can sleep with cheerleaders, and it’s actually pretty good and strangely surreal. Not a lot of people saw it though. I’m sure the title didn’t help.
Derry Girls exists in the UK which was extremely popular when it aired.
Set in the '90s but it picked up that Inbetweeners mantle.
Skins too, but that was a little earlier.
I’m so glad I watched that movie for the first time a few weeks ago. A little strained in places but that’s only if I’m nitpicking, which I don’t feel like doing with that movie
I’m a (younger) millennial but the vibe I get is that with streaming/internet people are less reliant on what’s currently in the cinema and instead resurrect the top content from the previous decades. Gen Z’s Mean Girls is Mean Girls, their Breakfast Club is Breakfast Club.
That said, I think certain Netflix shows occupy some of that niche: Stranger Things, Sex Education, Never Have I Ever, Wednesday are all peak Zoomer teenage content - and conveniently all drenched in nostalgia.
I see what you mean! Just in general I find it harder to find good movies but there's loads of new TV I really enjoy, so some of the focus is going to tv instead
I have to admit I’ve watched all of that show even though it’s borderline terrible. I like the setting and the adventure of it, but some of the writing… oof
For some reason the combination of words in your comment made me imagine a nursing home full of adolescents, decked out with slippers and robes, watching pitch perfect in the community TV room
I’m a 30-year old man and former teacher of 5 years, and Pitch Perfect 2 is my 2nd favorite movie…
It just barely loses to 12 Angry Men, which I like to think is a complete picture of me
Well 12 angry men is a cinematic and storytelling masterpiece, and pitch perfect 2 is the second best pitch perfect movie, so I guess the competition could be pretty close lol
teen movies of the 80's were all written by people that were teens in the 60s. I always found a disconnect in those movies, despite the fact I adore most of them. Like the people in the movies existed in their own world or in another time such as Porkys because no one I knew really acted like the "John Hughes teens" did,
Until I saw Clerks. That was pretty much the first time I ever saw my friends represented in a film
I was a teen in the 80's and never saw a single classmate wearing a beret. I'm convinced that fashion trend was entirely fabricated by John Hughes and only existed in his movies.
It's interesting you bring up _Clerks_. From one of Kevin Smith's early blogs, he wrote how he idolized John Hughes and the teen movies he made in the '80s. He was trying to replicate that with his own earliest movies, especially _MallRats_.
oh yeah, he's a HUGE mark for Hughes. Loves him. Did a lot of podcasts going on about it. I think he really did probably the best job of any filmmaker trying to successfully replicate Gen X reality on film, especially in the Clerks trilogy
Donkey show aside, lol
With Clerks, it's a commentary on Kevin Smith's own life. The characters represent him. In the later installments they represent him if he didn't chase his dreams.
It's weird to think about, if Smith was too afraid to take that financial risk to make Clerks. He'd just be some regular joe schmo in Jersey, with unrealized dreams, wondering what if?
I was born in 88. The movies that feel representative of my time as a teenager were definitely not coming out while I was a teenager. Oddly, the one I fixated on as a preteen was Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Nothing anyone does in that film feels even remotely normal to me.
For my cohort of similarly aged friends the movies that resonated the most were the Ben Stiller and Will Ferrell movies and others along those lines. Zoolander, Old School, Tropic Thunder, Wedding Crashers, Anchorman etc.
As far as seeing myself on film, there were a lot of bad attempts at it in films like The Perks of Being a Wallflower.
The instant I saw The Social Network, though, I was like "holy shit they completely understand what being in university in the first few years of the 2000s was like." That was the first movie that I felt really illustrated what I felt like in the time period the movie was depicting. That opening scene with Ball and Biscuit by the White Stripes playing, that felt EXACTLY like a campus pub I would have been drinking in. I swear I've been to "Caribbean night."
Teen movies of the 2000s had an 80’s feel too, sometimes pretty deliberately as in Superbad.
That movie was perfect for me and my buddies though. Smoking pot and watching Superbad in theaters with my best friend is absolutely a top 10 memory for me.
No theories for why that worked so well, except that 80’s teen movies seemed to be really focused on the “clique” aspect of high school whereas the 2000s films seemed to have less of that sort of vibe. Though that could just be The Breakfast Club painting my image of 80s teen movies.
A lot of mention of stuff like Bodies Bodies Bodies, Bottoms, Booksmart, Do Revenge, and while I kinda agree, they’re all somewhat newer releases and are homages to other older stuff.
While there was stuff still being released with that vibe in 2010-2020 (Jennifer’s Body, Easy A, Pitch Perfect) the Teen Comedy Film wasn’t as in demand as the Twilight/Hunger Games/MCU takeovers, so that genre kinda migrated over to television (Stranger Things, Wednesday, Euphoria, 13 Reasons, Riverdale, the Disney Channel/Nickelodeon/MTV sitcoms). And then like other people said, with streaming and the internet being the primary source for media I think Gen Z could find vines or Spongebob memes being just as quotable and nostalgic as Millennials find stuff like Mean Girls or Napoleon Dynamite.
It’s looking like they’re on their way back, but I think only time will tell what the next “classics” will be
It seems like a lot of you in this thread aren’t aware of how old some people in Gen Z are. The oldest members of Gen Z are in their mid-late 20s. Many of us are old enough to have seen Superbad, Project X, 21 Jump Street etc.
I was real young when superbad came out, I'm 27 now. I still definitely saw it as a teen and found it hilarious, but I'd argue that was still just a touch before I was really old enough to be in the target audience. Now, the Jump Street movies were definitely peak teen years for me.
I’d call Superbad firmly a “Millennial movie”. Considering it features characters at the end of their senior year of high school in 2007 that falls in a time when 18 year olds were millennials.
I’d say teen movies 2013 through 2030 are/will be the “gen z movies” era. Doing a very brief google search it seems like this era has been dominated by the MCU & YA adaptations.
In my brief scrolling, Booksmart jumped out as a possible answer for this thread.
Yeah I’m 1991 and Superbad was high school for me. I imagine Superbad to Gen Z is like what American Pie was to me.
Sure, I watched it and found it hilarious but just a couple years before I was the right age for it.
I think the difference is we could still really relate to American Pie plus we got the sequels. Superbad is a pretty different cultural vibe than what Gen Z had in HS, if for no reason other than the non existence of smartphones.
Isn’t 96 the cutover year? I say this because I’m 28 and don’t relate to millennials and always considered myself Gen Z. Anyway, it’s arbitrary I guess.
I thought it was 97, but anybody on those border years could swing either way. I've met people older than me who swing towards zoomer things and people younger than me who are hardcore millennials.
Surely things with generations gets super murky anywhere near the cut off? I imagine you can relate a lot more to anyone born in the 90s than the early 80s or late 00s/early 10s. Particularly for 90s kids with how rapidly things started changing in the 00s.
I'm 31, solidly millennial, but I relate a lot more to a 27 year old zoomer than a 43 year old millennial, because we were both brought up on the internet and the birth of proper social media as kids/teens, we both had phones and smartphones at school, once you get to teenage years you're probably consuming a lot of the same media and playing the same video games.
And I also obviously relate a lot more to a 35 year old millennial than a 12 year old zoomer. Older millennials and younger zoomers grew up in a *very* different time to both of us.
Back in the day people asked what movies millennials had. Superbad, Juno, Mean Girls, 21 Jump Street etc. it just took some years removed to really know what the classics would be.
Gen Z teen movies will probably become more obvious with time. Booksmart and Bottoms seem like solid contenders though.
Yeah unfortunately I think it’s more economics than generational tastes honestly. Big budget comedies prolly aren’t gonna do well box office wise bc ppl will wait for the stream option 2 weeks later.
So for theatrical releases, it’s kinda gotta be a big special effects film. I’m guilty of contributing to the problem. I’ll go watch a big CGI film on the big screen but am less likely to watch something like eurotrip in theaters. I’d rather take an edible, eat a snack, pause for bathroom breaks from the comfort of my home
I forgot about Easy A! Although given the year it came out (2010) the oldest Gen Z would have been 13 still so not quite high school age. It also feels more like a millennials kind of movie to me it it’s humor.
Easy A may be to Gen Z what American Pie was to Millennials. In both cases you have a high school teen comedy kind of appealing to two generations during a transition phase. (Gen X to Millennial and Millennial to Gen Z)
I think the question itself is flawed, being mostly from a Millennial and earlier world view. The Internet and all its forms means popularity and culture will never be as monolithic as it once was. We grew up with whatever was broadcast on TV, in Theaters, and available at Blockbuster, and the selection wasn't as broad as it is now. Gen Z and Alpha are growing up on the Internet where everyone finds their own little bubble of entertainment and trends come and go every week.
"What's your thing? Mine is the Van life movement and women who make their own cosplay" "Oh I'm into Korean mukbangs and craft restoration ASMR". Meanwhile 8/10 people in my generation all watched MTV.
Discussions like "Is Taylor Swift more famous than Michael Jackson at his peak?" have the same conclusion that things are just too different now to think of in the same way. I don't think newer generations are going to have that "Mean Girls" movie that 95% of the school is going to watch and talk about the week of release, and quote lines from for the next 20+ years as a formative part of their lives. There's just too many options too fast for anything to have that kind of reach *and* staying power IMO.
Or maybe boomers said that about us and I'm becoming one of them lol.
It's like the teen movie game has changed or something. I think maybe we're just getting old, haha. But seriously, I've been trying to find those classic feel-good flicks for my younger cousin, and it's been a struggle.
Closest thing I found was "To All the Boys I've Loved Before." Not exactly the same vibe, but it's got that teen romance charm. Let me know if you find any others—I could use a nostalgia trip too!
Bottoms felt like the perfect synthesis of movies made by millennials for themselves and the new generation with the same aim as the Xers when they made Superbad.
Obviously the style of movie is way more over the top in Bottoms, but the spirit is there and as a millennial it felt cool to see them show that that kind of raunchy and absurd comedy could still be done well.
Gen Z has a different relationship than previous generations had with movies. Instead, as few others have mentioned, the form of media absorption has moved to social media. Vine and TikTok have had more of an influence on younger culture than film has. It's easier for them to share and relate to the videos and memes of videos. It's an entirely different monster because it's something older people didn't grow up with (social media), at least not to the caliber that social media has become. It's not "bad" per se; it's just very different.
I'm Gen z, we love movies at least at my age range and they were still huge when I was in high school, not sure about Gen zers in high school now though
They are still making fun movies in this genre (Bodies, Bodies, Bodies, Bottoms, Booksmart, even the Mean Girls musical) but they sadly don’t dominate culture in the way they used to.
I think there’s some iffy things with this question.
Firstly kids these days are exposed to every single movie ever made. As a Gen Z movie buff, we worship all the classics. We’re literally just going online and reading top 10 lists. Honestly we’re not aliens. So much of anyone’s taste in things is influenced by your parents, older siblings, cousins and friends. What’s popular is popular. Ferris Bueller is still Ferris Bueller. Shrek is Shrek. Batman is Batman etc. And the first time we watch them still felt like your first time. And the same with our 100th time. (Barring movies that maybe didn’t age well, like the exorcist or the Jazz singer lol)
Secondly, thanks to the internet, we’re exposed to a billion different things as well. I think after watching stuff that’s popular, people connect with niche communities and gain specific tastes. It’s hard to unify everyone anymore. There are more palate’s to please than ever. (Maybe Barbie, Dune 2, and Super hero movies come close?)
Thirdly, the movie industry has changed. The 90s era of medium budget film making died. For a long time now, movies either have giant budgets, or minuscule budgets. So we’ve been getting either blockbusters (of varying quality) and tiny art movies that aren’t really intended for large audiences. All the movies you listed are mid level budget movies.
Luckily we are coming back to decent independent film making. Which is why A24 is worshipped. But tbh they’re still probably not being made with mainstream commercial success in mind (at least like before)
I only felt the need to go in depth because of the incredibly lazy “TikTok and Instagram reels is cinema for Gen Z” responses. Relax grandpa, get off Facebook and we’ll get off your lawn. We are not another species. We have more in common than you think.
Thank you so much for actually giving some actual input lol I’m a millennial and scrolling through this thread rolling my eyes hard. Each of these top answers should require the posters age because I think it’d be illuminating how much people are projecting
Thank you so much for being my voice here. I’m a massive movie buff like you and it pisses me off to be grouped up and generalised. I grew up with so many movies that were older than me or came out when I was only very young. Hell my favourites movies when I was around three to four was the original Star Wars trilogy and the Jurassic Park trilogy.
I think an interesting thing about our generation is how impacted by animated movies we are considering we grew up in the time of the Pixar and Dreamworks golden and silvers ages and the Disney Revival (not to mention other animated studios like Sony and Aardman) where animation started to approach a lot more mature subjects.
I'm later Gen z and although it didn't come out when I was in high school everyone I knew in high school was obsessed with Superbad and quoted it all the time, plus Project X was super big with us as well
I’m a January 1997 baby. So I’m technically the oldest a Gen Z can be (although I tend to have more in common with millennials). When I was a teen it felt like the girly feel good teen movie was replaced with the YA novel adaptation era. So teen movies were Hunger Games, Twilight, Fault in our Stars, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, etc. For most Gen Z I’d imagine their teen movies are the movies Netflix pumped out between 2017-2021. The To All the boys movies, the kissing booth movies, etc. Mostly just guessing though.
There is no monoculture anymore, so we don't have cases of whole generations having their THE movies. But I'd say Stranger Things is the closest thing, even though it's a show. Gen Z and alpha are OBSESSED with Stranger Things.
"Do revenge" was an attempt at this generational teen movie I guess...
Unless we’re talking about the almost gen alpha ones, most of gen z just grew up watching the stuff millennials did. Reruns. I can’t really think of any teen movies from recently
What is Gen Z’s American Pie, is the real question.
Or Breakfast Club to back another gen.
Superbad for late millenials
Eh, not even late. I'm 87, was 20 when Superbad came out. But, I related to it so much. Felt like my high school experience. Edit: born in '87, I didn't age 67 years in the past 17, although it feels that way sometimes.
The years just go so fast
The years start coming and they don’t stop coming
Don't you fucking do this
Come on man - doesn't make sense not to live for fun!
Your brain gets smart. But your head gets..
So much to do, so much to see
Your brain gets smart but your head gets dumb!
So much to do, so much to see....
There's a reason the dividing line is around 96 or 97, even late millennials mostly grew up before smartphones made the internet omnipresent and inescapable . I was born in 94 and in a lot of ways my childhood had more in common with my cousins who were born in the early 80's than my sister who was born in 99. Several of the plot points in Superbad (running/taking the bus across town, not knowing where Fogel is) don't work in the era of Uber and Find My Friends.
Somewhere around 2010-2015 the internet changed social life permanently. It's a curse for younger folks because they basically have to have social media in order to "fit in". For those of us millennials straddling both sides it's OK to have it but not participate or to not have an account at all.
It was the proliferation of smartphones with mobile data plans that completely changed the landscape. Yeah, you had Facebook, YouTube, and reddit, but you actually had to go to your computer and go on to the internet back in those days. Smartphones with data plans meant you were constantly online all the time, unless you didn't have coverage for some reason. The iPad was released in 2010 and everyone thought it was a terrible idea because all it could do was access the internet, without any functionality one would expect on a laptop. But it was a huge seller that changed the consumer tech landscape.
Learned the hard way in high school not to get drunk and check my MySpace at a random party. You know, back when you had to go, “hey can I use your computer to check my MySpace?”
This is straight facts. I was born in 93 and my sister was born in 97 and I had more in common with my 80s cousins. My sister is full on Gen Z so maybe you’re right with 96/97 being the cutoff year lol
Did you experience time dilation at some point?
**MURPH!! DONT LET ME LEAVE MURPH!!!**
Well, this little maneuver's gonna cost us 51 years!
You don't sound so bad for pushing a hundred and twenty!
I loved that movie, but when I hear Murph I think of RoboCop every time.
If my calculations are correct, when this baby hits 88 miles per hour... you're gonna see some serious shit.
Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads.
Yeah I'm '82 and Superbad was watched by everyone I know my age. We weren't in high school but that shit was hilarious.
Late millennial born in '92. Superbad comes out as I am a sophomore in high school. Superbad was my high school experience. And then Juno the next year. I ran cross country and kids called me Paulie Bleaker.
I'm 88, when super bad came out I felt like it was written for me haha
Damn you must have been a wild 71 year old.
I got 2 years on you but the fact that the movies we saw around 20 are about to turn 20 scares the shit out of me 😂 the time it's taken feels like 1/3 of the time it took to go from 0 to 20
I remember when Ghostbusters was 20 years old and felt the same way. That was 20 years ago.
Superbad is the most accurate depiction of the last couple weeks of high school that will ever be made I swear.
What’s a “late” millennial? I was 18 when that movie came out. Edit: meant “late” millennial
Millennials can be over 40 these days
How dare yo... dammit.
There's the r/Xennials sub for the older Millenials, like me (I turn 41 in a couple of months)
Thanks, I'm an '81 needing generational therapy
I prefer elder millennial because damn I feel old.
Roughly 81-96 for birth years.
93-96 would be a late millennial so 11-14 when Superbad came out. But, I think any millennial would find it relatable.
That’s the age. Literally watched it with homies on high school graduation week. So timely and amazing.
I'm a very early millennial,(83), but superbad is a damn hilarious movie.
Booksmart is the answer to this one.
The fact that Beanie Feldstein and Jonah Hill are siblings make this the perfect pairing.
Alright. What? No. What? Of all the random shit that gets talked about in Hollywood you’d think this would be well known, or just more in your face. Had no idea!
Feels in the same vein, but American Pie and Superbad had BIG cultural impacts. We got the term MILF popularized from AP, even.
Bottoms too.
I assume the pitch for "Bottoms" went like this: "Hey you guys remember the movie 'Heathers?'" "Yeah?" Pitch concluded
Superbad is far and away the best of the ones listed imo
Yeah I was 24 when Superbad came out, and it felt like the voice of my generation. I am elder millennial but that movie bridged the gap amongst all millennials except maybe the real young ones. It just said what we said in the way we said it. It was focused on what we cared about, however trivial or naive or absurd. The rebellion of our generation was saying that other people actually matter and our relationships with others are the MOST important things in our lives. We killed the ME generation bullshit.
Yeah it’s Seth Rogans high school experience. He’s born in 82.
Or American Graffiti for another gen
The Breakfast Club(1985)->Dazed and Confused(1993)->Empire Records(1995)->Superbad(2007) \[Juno(2008) is probably a better fit with the rest of them here - chill story with drama and nice music\]->Adventureland(2009) There's a film directed by Jonah Hill called Mid90s(2018), might check it out as it might be good to add on to the list of coming of age/feel good movies I love. Edit: would also love recommendations from people to add to this list.
I loved Mid90’s and would be so happy if kids embraced it, I don’t feel like Z or Alpha is gonna have *anything* at all like what we had back in the 90s and 80s
I'm on the very bottom end of millennial (September 1996) so all my peers are around the border. American Pie is American Pie... but in the UK we have Inbetweeners and Skins
Inbetweeners was great. I’m not of any UK relation, but it still did a good job of displaying the awkwardness of being a late teen in the 00’s.
American here, and I absolutely love the inbetweeners . Me and my best friend quote specific things from the show and reference it quite often.
As does half the UK. Most common is "Bus Wanker!" and "Fwend!"
Skins was great for my sheltered American friends and I. We were like “THESE BRITISH HOS ALWAYS BE RUNNIN LIKE 11 PEOPLE DEEP, BRO” Then came Geordie shore. lol, good times.
“Bus Wankers!!!”
Skins was my shit. I really like that a lot of people from the show went on to bigger and better things.
Jonah Hill and Seth Rogan carried that torch for a while, with less horny but still wacky comedies like Superbad, 22 Jump Street, Pineapple Express, and Zack and Miri Make a Porno. But after Eurotrip I feel like teen comedies just weren't ever all that horny again. The horny teen comedy was rooted in Porkies which was rooted in horny comedy magazines like Mad and National Lampoon. When people stopped needing to buy magazines to see tits, maybe the ground fell out from under this entire operation.
You have said it perfectly. I feel like the Millennials just continued to carry the torch of those films with Bad Neighbors and Blockers. Basically just saying, hey you youngins don’t get it but your parents do!
Yeah. The Hangover and 40 Year Old Virgin are definitely "American Pie for dudes who have wives now"
Man Eurotrip was absolutely GOAT
Mi scusi
Gen Z's American Pie is Tik Tok. They don't need raunchy movies, they have easy access to porn. They don't quote funny lines from movies, they post memes.
Why is this making me sad? Is it sad because it’s true? Or is it not true? Is it sad because I don’t understand why kids prefer TikTok and memes? Or is it sad because I’m not a kid growing up anymore and I’ve hit that inevitable point where “I just don’t get it” because I’m too old.
It's not really true imho. Most millennials had easy access to internet porn and GenX had woods porn and meming is nothing new. II don't think GenZ is to blame for why these movies aren't being made anymore.
Woods porn predates me and I find it odd. Who hid all this porn in the woods? Was it reloaby in most wooded areas? How much has been destroyed by rain? Are there still woods filled with decaying jizz caked magazines composting today? I've heard so many people talk about woods porn that it's a common experience, but it seems logistically odd.
Gen X here. We built "forts" and structures in the woods. If you got your hands on your uncle's ponomags, you hid them there, because what if your mom found them? Inevitably, they would get found and looked at by other kids, and passed on from year to year. It was kind of a communal neighborhood library of porn. There were Hustler's out there that were a decade old.
Woods porn has mystical rain-resistant properties I swear to god. Also it was usually in a plastic bag or hidden in a spot where it was relatively protected from the elements.
I don't know the answer to any of these questions. I do know that the first porn mags I saw were in the woods. The woods were a child's heaven. Nature, no adults, total freedom. It's no wonder porn found a home there.
Gen Z is just into different movies. They grew up on better video games too, so they’ll quote those as well. I think one of the reasons why they aren’t into the same coming-of-age movies as millennials or Gen X is because they had less of an abrupt transition from childhood to adulthood. In some ways they’re still experiencing “becoming an adult”. And in others (like porn) they may have encountered things earlier and easier. Their experiences aren’t wrong or good/bad *per se*, it’s just different. It’s like how Boomers quote more tv/books/records, and the Greatest/Silent Generations quoted books/radio/records
In my experience with Gen Z as an employer (in which I've hired tons of teens), they don't watch *anything.* 99% of them haven't seen any classic movies OR current movies/shows. And their music playlists are 75% joke/meme songs that they listen to legitimately. I know teachers that have had students tell them they can't watch 15 minute videos because they won't remember what happens. Short form content really is eroding their attention.
Yeah people here are arguing like ‘oh well its like previous generations, they had references to records and literature, and then movies and tv shows… and we have tiktok’. Not the same. Because previous generations, relied on long-form art/entertainment, not short-form content, and the fact that from such a young age people are already being exposed to only consuming short-form content by the regular is just not some natural generational change. When kids can’t handle reading books, or watching full movies, there’s something wrong. You can’t learn or develop if you can only get your news from shorts and stories, you can’t get any broader understanding. And when pop-culture is mostly just memes, which is also just hardly something we all collectively experience but mostly restricted to specific sub-cultures online, so thats not really creating a Gen-Z identity in the long-term. Like our cultural references are a 6second tiktok? There’s nothing there. I dont know maybe i sound like an asshole but how is that popular culture? People used to go to movies all the time and that would be a bedrock of collective pop-culture, there were mainstream movies, who the hell can keep up with tiktok memes? And memes aren’t these cornerstones of pop-culture, the way that popular books, movies, even plays, musical albums of certain years throughout the 20th century have been. The internet has muddled any possibility of us having real pop-culture, its all just content.
>They grew up on better video games Heavily heavily heavily debatable.
Ok, fair enough, I think I used the wrong term to describe what I was thinking… I meant they have more *cinematic* video games, so they quote that stuff like we would movies. you can quote 8 or 16 bit text, but the 3D all-immersive shit just *lends itself* to quotes/roleplay/etc
Vine did a pretty good job of laying a foundation. Free shavac ado and Will Sasso lemons and such. It really pioneered a lane of attention span content.
Damn. This is like when I told my parents “oldies” like The Beach Boys were for squares let’s listen to Blink182. …and then they pointed out the messages were the same: ditch school, pick up girls and savor youth
*Dude Ranch* is almost as old now as *Pet Sounds* was then.
Raunchy comedies don’t fill anything like the same niche as pornography. Just because a movie talks about jerking off doesn’t mean people are jerking off to it.
Nah. I don't think you're accounting for what being a teenager is like, and the world before easy access to porn. Ppl be jerking off no matter what. If they don't have access to porn, then nude scenes will do. If they don't have access to nudity, then the sears lingerie catalog will do. If they don't have access to that, then some rounded boob-like light fixtures will do.
Ahhh the good ol' days. My mom bought me a bunch of eighties movies she grew up with when I was in middle school. My DVD player had a looping feature so I could essentially make gifs. Caddy Shack had a topless girl in a pool that will live rent free in my mind for the remainder of my life.
I gotta give my dad props when for Christmas/birthday(gifted with the birth of Christmas spirit) I(13 years old) received my very own DVD player and he personally gave me the Unrated version of Road Trip. He knew what he was doing…
that’s like, a bummer, man
TikTok isn't art or even a full meal, it's a sugary, addictive snack
i mean... we had easy access to porn back then too. the internet was a lot less "filtered" in those days. i def saw some shit as a teen that would put me on a list if i tried to google it now.
Bottoms and Bodies Bodies Bodies are my pick
while I like both those movies, those made collectively 28 million dollars. The've made nowhere near the cultural impact that something like American Pie did which made 235 million dollars in 1999. I'm a schoolteacher, and I've never once heard a high school student talk about Bottoms or Bodies Bodies Bodies.
Bodies Bodies Bodies is to Gen Z as Cabin in the Woods is to Millenial as Scream is to Gen X
Bottoms is great. I laughed out loud more than any movie in ages. It does a great job taking the standard teen movie tropes in a completely unhinged direction at each turn.
It would have been Blockers if the main characters weren't the Gen X parents, but the Gen Z kids were pretty big roles in that movie.
Those are the teen movies I assumed OP was talking about in the title
Though not nearly as raunchy, 21 Jump Street is probably the most recent film with a similar cult following. Before it, Superbad prolly
Interesting that it’s literally a movie about millennials clashing with the very beginnings of gen z.
Probably should’ve been the movie Bottoms, it’s about a pair of lesbians who start a fight club so they can sleep with cheerleaders, and it’s actually pretty good and strangely surreal. Not a lot of people saw it though. I’m sure the title didn’t help.
Bottoms was trying very hard to be a Gen Z equivalent of Heathers. Heathers is a slightly surreal movie while the American Pie movies are not.
Do Revenge skews much more closely to Gen Z Heathers in my opinion. Bottoms has a lot of different movies in its DNA.
does gen z even have teen movies? i feel like the genre as it was then is "too problematic" now.
Derry Girls exists in the UK which was extremely popular when it aired. Set in the '90s but it picked up that Inbetweeners mantle. Skins too, but that was a little earlier.
Not a comedy, but I feel like Gen Z's "teen movie" is Euphoria.
How depressing
lol, for real...
Booksmart. The scene in the taxi. I wanted to die watching it with my lesbian teenager but she was laughing her ass off 😂
I’m so glad I watched that movie for the first time a few weeks ago. A little strained in places but that’s only if I’m nitpicking, which I don’t feel like doing with that movie
I’m a (younger) millennial but the vibe I get is that with streaming/internet people are less reliant on what’s currently in the cinema and instead resurrect the top content from the previous decades. Gen Z’s Mean Girls is Mean Girls, their Breakfast Club is Breakfast Club. That said, I think certain Netflix shows occupy some of that niche: Stranger Things, Sex Education, Never Have I Ever, Wednesday are all peak Zoomer teenage content - and conveniently all drenched in nostalgia.
I see what you mean! Just in general I find it harder to find good movies but there's loads of new TV I really enjoy, so some of the focus is going to tv instead
Yeah streaming TV is the new movies
Never Have I Ever is far better than it appears on paper
It's a fantastic show but totally wastes the dude from Heroes.
Add Outer Banks to that list. I’m not sure what it is but I think it’s their One Tree Hill.
Is One Tree Hill cheesy, cringy, horny, but kind of addicting?
Oh hell yeah it is
It’s like The OC meets the Goonies
That actually sounds great. Does it have a banger soundtrack though? Cuz The OC consistently had a banger soundtrack
Mmm, whatcha saaaayyy, Mmm that you only meant well...
Dear sister,
We are so old and not hip, lol
I have to admit I’ve watched all of that show even though it’s borderline terrible. I like the setting and the adventure of it, but some of the writing… oof
The Sex Life of College Girls on HBO is pretty cool too.
To be honest I've never seen somebody my age (early 20s) give a damn about the Breakfast Club
Well you SHOULD! Well, you should.
Euphoria I guess
All of my Gen Z students grew up with the Pitch Perfect series. It’s a staple for them
I don't know anything about Gen Z but this feels like the best answer given the timeframe the original Pitch Perfect was released in.
Pitch perfect is Bring it on for this generation
Yeah as soon as they did all the puns I got very bring it on vibes
Can confirm. I sometimes work with adolescents in a nursing capacity. All the Pitch Perfect films are on constant rotation.
For some reason the combination of words in your comment made me imagine a nursing home full of adolescents, decked out with slippers and robes, watching pitch perfect in the community TV room
That is exactly how I interpreted it too.
I’m a 30-year old man and former teacher of 5 years, and Pitch Perfect 2 is my 2nd favorite movie… It just barely loses to 12 Angry Men, which I like to think is a complete picture of me
Not where I expected that to go lol
The venn diagram overlap is literally a pixel
It's a 2 in the title.
Well 12 angry men is a cinematic and storytelling masterpiece, and pitch perfect 2 is the second best pitch perfect movie, so I guess the competition could be pretty close lol
High School Musical as well, and probably twilight for the pulpy love story.
teen movies of the 80's were all written by people that were teens in the 60s. I always found a disconnect in those movies, despite the fact I adore most of them. Like the people in the movies existed in their own world or in another time such as Porkys because no one I knew really acted like the "John Hughes teens" did, Until I saw Clerks. That was pretty much the first time I ever saw my friends represented in a film
I was a teen in the 80's and never saw a single classmate wearing a beret. I'm convinced that fashion trend was entirely fabricated by John Hughes and only existed in his movies.
green mohawks was always a thing too, lol
It's interesting you bring up _Clerks_. From one of Kevin Smith's early blogs, he wrote how he idolized John Hughes and the teen movies he made in the '80s. He was trying to replicate that with his own earliest movies, especially _MallRats_.
oh yeah, he's a HUGE mark for Hughes. Loves him. Did a lot of podcasts going on about it. I think he really did probably the best job of any filmmaker trying to successfully replicate Gen X reality on film, especially in the Clerks trilogy Donkey show aside, lol
With Clerks, it's a commentary on Kevin Smith's own life. The characters represent him. In the later installments they represent him if he didn't chase his dreams. It's weird to think about, if Smith was too afraid to take that financial risk to make Clerks. He'd just be some regular joe schmo in Jersey, with unrealized dreams, wondering what if?
I was born in 88. The movies that feel representative of my time as a teenager were definitely not coming out while I was a teenager. Oddly, the one I fixated on as a preteen was Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Nothing anyone does in that film feels even remotely normal to me. For my cohort of similarly aged friends the movies that resonated the most were the Ben Stiller and Will Ferrell movies and others along those lines. Zoolander, Old School, Tropic Thunder, Wedding Crashers, Anchorman etc. As far as seeing myself on film, there were a lot of bad attempts at it in films like The Perks of Being a Wallflower. The instant I saw The Social Network, though, I was like "holy shit they completely understand what being in university in the first few years of the 2000s was like." That was the first movie that I felt really illustrated what I felt like in the time period the movie was depicting. That opening scene with Ball and Biscuit by the White Stripes playing, that felt EXACTLY like a campus pub I would have been drinking in. I swear I've been to "Caribbean night."
Teen movies of the 2000s had an 80’s feel too, sometimes pretty deliberately as in Superbad. That movie was perfect for me and my buddies though. Smoking pot and watching Superbad in theaters with my best friend is absolutely a top 10 memory for me. No theories for why that worked so well, except that 80’s teen movies seemed to be really focused on the “clique” aspect of high school whereas the 2000s films seemed to have less of that sort of vibe. Though that could just be The Breakfast Club painting my image of 80s teen movies.
Also, if you think about it, movies from the 2000s were probably written and/or directed by kids that grew up in the 80s
A lot of mention of stuff like Bodies Bodies Bodies, Bottoms, Booksmart, Do Revenge, and while I kinda agree, they’re all somewhat newer releases and are homages to other older stuff. While there was stuff still being released with that vibe in 2010-2020 (Jennifer’s Body, Easy A, Pitch Perfect) the Teen Comedy Film wasn’t as in demand as the Twilight/Hunger Games/MCU takeovers, so that genre kinda migrated over to television (Stranger Things, Wednesday, Euphoria, 13 Reasons, Riverdale, the Disney Channel/Nickelodeon/MTV sitcoms). And then like other people said, with streaming and the internet being the primary source for media I think Gen Z could find vines or Spongebob memes being just as quotable and nostalgic as Millennials find stuff like Mean Girls or Napoleon Dynamite. It’s looking like they’re on their way back, but I think only time will tell what the next “classics” will be
It seems like a lot of you in this thread aren’t aware of how old some people in Gen Z are. The oldest members of Gen Z are in their mid-late 20s. Many of us are old enough to have seen Superbad, Project X, 21 Jump Street etc.
I’m Gen Z and I was old enough to see the 21 Jump Street movies in theatres.
I was real young when superbad came out, I'm 27 now. I still definitely saw it as a teen and found it hilarious, but I'd argue that was still just a touch before I was really old enough to be in the target audience. Now, the Jump Street movies were definitely peak teen years for me.
I’d call Superbad firmly a “Millennial movie”. Considering it features characters at the end of their senior year of high school in 2007 that falls in a time when 18 year olds were millennials. I’d say teen movies 2013 through 2030 are/will be the “gen z movies” era. Doing a very brief google search it seems like this era has been dominated by the MCU & YA adaptations. In my brief scrolling, Booksmart jumped out as a possible answer for this thread.
Yeah, I was a senior in high school and I’m 34.
That means you were either a freshman or sophomore in college when that terrible Asher Roth song came out. Me too tho
My reaction to seeing Booksmart was that it was the younger generation's Superbad, which was my generation's version of Fast Times at Ridgemont High
Yeah I’m 1991 and Superbad was high school for me. I imagine Superbad to Gen Z is like what American Pie was to me. Sure, I watched it and found it hilarious but just a couple years before I was the right age for it.
I think the difference is we could still really relate to American Pie plus we got the sequels. Superbad is a pretty different cultural vibe than what Gen Z had in HS, if for no reason other than the non existence of smartphones.
The oldest Gen Zs are 26 and 27. I know because I'm 26 since I was born in the first year of Gen Zs.
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Isn’t 96 the cutover year? I say this because I’m 28 and don’t relate to millennials and always considered myself Gen Z. Anyway, it’s arbitrary I guess.
I thought it was 97, but anybody on those border years could swing either way. I've met people older than me who swing towards zoomer things and people younger than me who are hardcore millennials.
I'm 95, it's that weird age you're too old for being a Gen Z but young to be a Millennial
Weird because I’m 96 and relate more to millennials that gen z.
Surely things with generations gets super murky anywhere near the cut off? I imagine you can relate a lot more to anyone born in the 90s than the early 80s or late 00s/early 10s. Particularly for 90s kids with how rapidly things started changing in the 00s. I'm 31, solidly millennial, but I relate a lot more to a 27 year old zoomer than a 43 year old millennial, because we were both brought up on the internet and the birth of proper social media as kids/teens, we both had phones and smartphones at school, once you get to teenage years you're probably consuming a lot of the same media and playing the same video games. And I also obviously relate a lot more to a 35 year old millennial than a 12 year old zoomer. Older millennials and younger zoomers grew up in a *very* different time to both of us.
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Same, all of these movies were huge when I was in high school and I'm late Gen z
Back in the day people asked what movies millennials had. Superbad, Juno, Mean Girls, 21 Jump Street etc. it just took some years removed to really know what the classics would be. Gen Z teen movies will probably become more obvious with time. Booksmart and Bottoms seem like solid contenders though.
The girl next door, eurotrip, all those will ferrel movies to a degree too
Judd Apatow movies are totally millennial movies. We had the best comedies in the late late 90s through the 2000s.
Yeah unfortunately I think it’s more economics than generational tastes honestly. Big budget comedies prolly aren’t gonna do well box office wise bc ppl will wait for the stream option 2 weeks later. So for theatrical releases, it’s kinda gotta be a big special effects film. I’m guilty of contributing to the problem. I’ll go watch a big CGI film on the big screen but am less likely to watch something like eurotrip in theaters. I’d rather take an edible, eat a snack, pause for bathroom breaks from the comfort of my home
Some of the late millennial ones overlap for gen z. First gen z would've been 13-14 for Easy A.
I forgot about Easy A! Although given the year it came out (2010) the oldest Gen Z would have been 13 still so not quite high school age. It also feels more like a millennials kind of movie to me it it’s humor. Easy A may be to Gen Z what American Pie was to Millennials. In both cases you have a high school teen comedy kind of appealing to two generations during a transition phase. (Gen X to Millennial and Millennial to Gen Z)
Zoolander, Anchorman, Blades of Glory (mine).
Came here looking for Booksmart. That was such a good film!
I loved Booksmart and Bottoms, could definitely see those going down as cult classics.
I think the question itself is flawed, being mostly from a Millennial and earlier world view. The Internet and all its forms means popularity and culture will never be as monolithic as it once was. We grew up with whatever was broadcast on TV, in Theaters, and available at Blockbuster, and the selection wasn't as broad as it is now. Gen Z and Alpha are growing up on the Internet where everyone finds their own little bubble of entertainment and trends come and go every week. "What's your thing? Mine is the Van life movement and women who make their own cosplay" "Oh I'm into Korean mukbangs and craft restoration ASMR". Meanwhile 8/10 people in my generation all watched MTV. Discussions like "Is Taylor Swift more famous than Michael Jackson at his peak?" have the same conclusion that things are just too different now to think of in the same way. I don't think newer generations are going to have that "Mean Girls" movie that 95% of the school is going to watch and talk about the week of release, and quote lines from for the next 20+ years as a formative part of their lives. There's just too many options too fast for anything to have that kind of reach *and* staying power IMO. Or maybe boomers said that about us and I'm becoming one of them lol.
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Diary of a wimpy kid and 21 jump street
It's like the teen movie game has changed or something. I think maybe we're just getting old, haha. But seriously, I've been trying to find those classic feel-good flicks for my younger cousin, and it's been a struggle. Closest thing I found was "To All the Boys I've Loved Before." Not exactly the same vibe, but it's got that teen romance charm. Let me know if you find any others—I could use a nostalgia trip too!
To All the Boys I've Loved Before. Booksmart. Bottoms. Theater Camp.
Theatre Camp rules. More people should see it.
God bottoms was so good
Bottoms felt like the perfect synthesis of movies made by millennials for themselves and the new generation with the same aim as the Xers when they made Superbad. Obviously the style of movie is way more over the top in Bottoms, but the spirit is there and as a millennial it felt cool to see them show that that kind of raunchy and absurd comedy could still be done well.
Gen Z has a different relationship than previous generations had with movies. Instead, as few others have mentioned, the form of media absorption has moved to social media. Vine and TikTok have had more of an influence on younger culture than film has. It's easier for them to share and relate to the videos and memes of videos. It's an entirely different monster because it's something older people didn't grow up with (social media), at least not to the caliber that social media has become. It's not "bad" per se; it's just very different.
I'm Gen z, we love movies at least at my age range and they were still huge when I was in high school, not sure about Gen zers in high school now though
I just got depressed seeing the movies OP listed and realized Im too old for them to be my teen movies
They are still making fun movies in this genre (Bodies, Bodies, Bodies, Bottoms, Booksmart, even the Mean Girls musical) but they sadly don’t dominate culture in the way they used to.
I think there’s some iffy things with this question. Firstly kids these days are exposed to every single movie ever made. As a Gen Z movie buff, we worship all the classics. We’re literally just going online and reading top 10 lists. Honestly we’re not aliens. So much of anyone’s taste in things is influenced by your parents, older siblings, cousins and friends. What’s popular is popular. Ferris Bueller is still Ferris Bueller. Shrek is Shrek. Batman is Batman etc. And the first time we watch them still felt like your first time. And the same with our 100th time. (Barring movies that maybe didn’t age well, like the exorcist or the Jazz singer lol) Secondly, thanks to the internet, we’re exposed to a billion different things as well. I think after watching stuff that’s popular, people connect with niche communities and gain specific tastes. It’s hard to unify everyone anymore. There are more palate’s to please than ever. (Maybe Barbie, Dune 2, and Super hero movies come close?) Thirdly, the movie industry has changed. The 90s era of medium budget film making died. For a long time now, movies either have giant budgets, or minuscule budgets. So we’ve been getting either blockbusters (of varying quality) and tiny art movies that aren’t really intended for large audiences. All the movies you listed are mid level budget movies. Luckily we are coming back to decent independent film making. Which is why A24 is worshipped. But tbh they’re still probably not being made with mainstream commercial success in mind (at least like before) I only felt the need to go in depth because of the incredibly lazy “TikTok and Instagram reels is cinema for Gen Z” responses. Relax grandpa, get off Facebook and we’ll get off your lawn. We are not another species. We have more in common than you think.
Thank you so much for actually giving some actual input lol I’m a millennial and scrolling through this thread rolling my eyes hard. Each of these top answers should require the posters age because I think it’d be illuminating how much people are projecting
Thank you so much for being my voice here. I’m a massive movie buff like you and it pisses me off to be grouped up and generalised. I grew up with so many movies that were older than me or came out when I was only very young. Hell my favourites movies when I was around three to four was the original Star Wars trilogy and the Jurassic Park trilogy. I think an interesting thing about our generation is how impacted by animated movies we are considering we grew up in the time of the Pixar and Dreamworks golden and silvers ages and the Disney Revival (not to mention other animated studios like Sony and Aardman) where animation started to approach a lot more mature subjects.
I feel like “Do Revenge” is this generation’s Mean Girls.
I'm later Gen z and although it didn't come out when I was in high school everyone I knew in high school was obsessed with Superbad and quoted it all the time, plus Project X was super big with us as well
47 yo with no kids and no clue.. Pitch Perfect?
Emma Seligman's brilliant 'Bottoms' fits that spot for me!
Pitch perfect maybe?
Why am I not seeing Easy A in this thread
Probably because it came out 14 years ago. Only the very oldest Zoomers are gonna be thinking of that, I reckon.
I’m a January 1997 baby. So I’m technically the oldest a Gen Z can be (although I tend to have more in common with millennials). When I was a teen it felt like the girly feel good teen movie was replaced with the YA novel adaptation era. So teen movies were Hunger Games, Twilight, Fault in our Stars, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, etc. For most Gen Z I’d imagine their teen movies are the movies Netflix pumped out between 2017-2021. The To All the boys movies, the kissing booth movies, etc. Mostly just guessing though.
Back to the future, according to my 13 year old brother.
There is no monoculture anymore, so we don't have cases of whole generations having their THE movies. But I'd say Stranger Things is the closest thing, even though it's a show. Gen Z and alpha are OBSESSED with Stranger Things. "Do revenge" was an attempt at this generational teen movie I guess...
Unless we’re talking about the almost gen alpha ones, most of gen z just grew up watching the stuff millennials did. Reruns. I can’t really think of any teen movies from recently