The three actors are exceptionally close, and their IRL relationships have only fueled the fan interest in “The Kissing Booth.” King, Courtney and Elordi were sitting around a plate of fries after a few rounds of arcade games at Dave & Buster’s. “I really, really wanted to do it, but I also was afraid, of course, that it would get kind of lost in the crowd of all the Netflix content,” she explained.
She loved the script and the idea of playing a teenager who is comfortable with her body - especially after years of playing cutesy kid types on the big screen. Still, King admits she was somewhat skeptical of signing onto a Netflix movie. “We thought this had a Disney Channel vibe, but felt slightly more grounded - it felt like an interesting, underserved spot between younger YA and edgier teen fare.”
“We had ‘13 Reasons Why’ and ‘Stranger Things’ on the series side, but it was a space we hadn’t explored much on the film side,” said Ian Bricke, Netflix’s director of independent film. Which is partially why the company decided to produce “The Kissing Booth,” financing the film’s two-month shoot in South Africa last year. Even a “success,” like Will Smith’s “Bright” - which Netflix says attracted a lot of eyeballs, though it never publicly released streaming figures - was dinged by scathing reviews.īut few, if any, of Netflix’s movies outside of its film library have been aimed at young people. Other titles - from “Okja” to “War Machine” to Sundance prize winner “I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore” - have flown lower on the cultural radar. While the streaming giant has produced a slew of respected, award-nominated television fare - “Orange Is the New Black,” “House of Cards,” “Making a Murderer” - its film content has yet to make the same kind of broad impact.ĭee Rees’ “Mudbound,” which the company picked up at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, earned Netflix its first Oscar nominations outside of documentary categories just this year. It’s also an intriguing new piece in the ongoing puzzle known as Netflix original movies. Most of the plot points and supporting characters are blatant rip-offs of earlier teen films, which gives the film a similar quality to those pop songs that build their hooks by sampling previous hits.” In other words, “The Kissing Booth” is cute enough, but the majority of critics have declared it an objectively bad movie: It has a 14% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.īut as Vulture put it, the romantic comedy is “bad in a comforting way. It was directed by Vince Marcello, a Disney Channel filmmaker responsible for “Teen Beach Movie” and its subsequent sequel, “Teen Beach 2.”
It follows an upbeat teenager named Elle (King) whose high school existence is going swimmingly until she falls for her best friend’s hunky older brother (Courtney plays the BFF, Elordi the b.f.). The film is based on a story written by a 15-year-old, and it first appeared on Wattpad, an online self-publishing platform.