Bottoms (film)

Two high school senior girls set up a "fight club" to hook up with cheerleaders before graduation.[6]

In April 2021 it was announced that Seligman and Sennott were working with Orion Pictures and Brownstone Productions with Elizabeth Banks and Max Handelman, and Alison Small producing for Brownstone, with Alana Mayo for Orion. It is the second collaboration between Seligman and Sennott after 2020’s Shiva Baby.[7] Whilst promoting that film Seligman described her next project as a "campy queer high school comedy in the vein of Wet Hot American Summer but more for a Gen-Z queer audience."[8]^{: 39:07–39:45} In April 2022, it was announced that Ayo Edebiri, Marshawn Lynch, Ruby Cruz, Havana Rose Liu, Kaia Gerber, Nicholas Galitzine, Miles Fowler, Dagmara Dominczyk and Punkie Johnson were added to the cast.[9][10] Filming was scheduled to take place in New Orleans between April 18 and May 27, 2022.[11] On September 12, 2022 it was confirmed by The New York Times that filming had wrapped and Sennott described the film as “two girls in a classic American football town who start a fight club under the guise of female empowerment, but it’s actually so they can have sex with cheerleaders.”[12]

Eunice Jera Lee served as costume designer on the film. For dressing the young cast, Lee took inspiration from Grease (1978), Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986), Heathers (1988), Jawbreaker (1999), and Bring It On (2000).[13]

Bottoms premiered at the SXSW film festival on March 11, 2023.[14] It is set to be theatrically released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer on August 25, 2023.[5]

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, Bottoms has an approval rating of 95%, based on 21 reviews with an average rating of 8.5/10.[15]

Reviewing the film for Variety, following its premiere at South by Southwest, Owen Gleiberman commended the direction and screenplay (particularly its characters and humor), stating: "Bottoms is unlike any high-school comedy you’ve ever seen. It’s a satire of victimization, a satire of violence, and a satire of itself. It walks a tightrope between sensitivity and insanity (with a knowing bit of inanity), and it’s full of moments that are defiantly what we once used to call incorrect".[16] Valerie Complex of Deadline admired the lead performances and Seligman's direction, but found some faults with the screenplay, ultimately concluding: "Bottoms is fun, but not with some slight tweaks this could have an epic exploration of the gray areas of queerness and what it means to stand in the center of that as an adolescent".[17] Referring to the film as the "horniest, bloodiest high school movie of the 21st century" in an highly enthusiastic review for Rolling Stone, David Fear lauded every aspect of the film, including its direction, screenplay and cast performances.[18]

• Bottoms at IMDb