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Why ‘Easy A’ Failed To Turn Emma Stone Into A Movie Star

This article is more than 3 years old.

The “all by myself” comedy hit Easy A wasn’t followed by more Emma Stone star vehicles, but merely a number of higher-profile love interest/daughter roles.

There are several run-of-the-mill studio programmers currently sitting on Netflix’s NFLX daily most-watched list, including two recent flops (Mark Wahlberg’s Mile 22 and Oliver Stone’s Snowden) and two decade-old hits (Emma Stone’s Easy A and Naomi Watts’ The Impossible). Keanu Reeves’ Knock Knock was a VOD-centric horror title that did just fine on a $2 million budget, but I digress. Easy A is the one that sticks out, because it (like Mile 22) resembles exactly the kind of movie that Netflix essentially put out of business on the theatrical level. It’s also a classic example of how even starring in an original box office smash can’t make you a star, especially if you’re not a white guy. Emma Stone’s Easy A mostly led to “love interest” roles while her male co-stars soared ever higher.

Director William Gluck and writer Bert V. Royal’s Easy A is a film very much in the style of Clueless, Ten Things I Hate About You and She’s All That. It too takes an older, high school-friendly novel and updates it to modern high school. The difference is that Easy A takes place in a world where its inspiration, The Scarlet Letter, actually exists and is discussed by its students. The PG-13 comedy concerns a young woman who tells a white lie to her best friend regarding a sexual encounter only to end up the talk of the school. Emma Stone’s heroine, Olive Penderghast, eventually finds herself underdoing a scenario not dissimilar to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel right as Olive’s English teacher (Thomas Haden Church) is teaching the book.

There’s a fun running gag concerning students watching the steamy and unfaithful Demi Moore version and suffering academically as a result. The mid-film turn, whereby Olive starts charging her outcast classmates to make up sexually salacious stories about her so that they can appear cooler, makes a pretty obvious point about gender-specific double standards, while examination religious-specific puritanism that I was hoping would be out of vogue by now. While I enjoyed Teenage Bounty Hunters, it was beyond depressing to see how little has changed since Saved! Likewise, Natalia Dyer’s Yes God Yes, about a religious teen exploring lust and self-pleasure, or Chloe Moretz’s gay conversion dramady The Miseducation of Cameron Post, are 1990’s period pieces that could easily take place today. It’s 2020 and we’re still losing our minds over Cuties.

Easy A was a winning and witty character-and-dialogue-driven comedy then and now. Like Clueless and Mean Girls, it makes the adults as funny (and specific) as the kids, giving Lisa Kudrow a surprisingly meaty supporting turn while presenting Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson as comedically “hip” parents who still do the job of parenting. The film earned strong reviews and solid buzz, opening atop the weekend box office in mid-September of 2010 with $17 million, legging out to $75 million worldwide on an $8 million budget. As sadly predicted by me at the time, Stone’s star vehicle hit wouldn’t be rewarded with a slew of star vehicles. She didn’t get as raw of a deal as Anna Faris after The House Bunny, but she merely was upgraded to A-level love interest.

She now got to be a love interest to Andrew Garfield in The Amazing Spider-Man, a role which only existed for the “fan-pleasing” climactic murder at the end of Amazing Spider-Man 2. She was a love interest to Ryan Gosling (and Sean Poll’s non-sexual moll) in both The Gangster Squad and Crazy Stupid Love, during which her virtue was fought over by Gosling and doting dad Steve Carell. She was paired with Colin Firth in Magic in the Moonlight. Marcia Gay Harden, who plays Stone’s mother in the Woody Allen flick, is just one year older than Firth. She co-starrred with Joaquin Phoenix in Allen’s Irrational Man. She was “the daughter” in Birdman (for which she received an Oscar nomination) and The Croods and she was Bradley Cooper’s love interest in Cameron Crowe’s Aloha.

That Cameron Crowe flop got her tossed in the Scarlett Johansson box and forced to “apologize” for playing a very white character who was one-quarter Chinese and one quarter Hawaiian. The one arguable starring role between Easy A and La La Land in late 2016 was The Help, a two-hander with Viola Davis positioning her as a young author trying to expose the cruel realities of Jim Crow-era house maids. It was a smash hit in summer 2011, earning $169 million domestic and $217 million worldwide. We can debate whether she was a co-lead in Damien Chazelle’s La La Land, and she won a Best Actress Oscar for the Stone/Gosling musical so we’ll say it counts. The blockbuster showbiz melodrama earned $151 million domestic and $441 million worldwide, and it was followed by Stone’s first unapologetic star vehicle.

In late 2017, she played Billy Jean King against Steve Carell’s Bobby Riggs in Fox Searchlight’s Battle of the Sexes. The period-piece tennis flick/lesbian melodrama was clearly produced back when we all thought Hillary Clinton was going to be our next president, so it didn’t quite play as inspirational as hoped. It’s a good movie, and the film focuses as much on Billy Jean King’s same-sex romance with Andrea Riseborough (and obvious conflicts with her husband, played by Austin Stowell, at the time) as it does on the “girls versus boys” tennis match. It would earn just $18.5 million worldwide on a $25 million budget, with the world still waiting for a blockbuster tennis movie. She was a co-lead in Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite alongside Rachel Weisz and Olivia Coleman.

She reprised as Jesse Eisenberg’s love interest in Zombieland: Double Tap and will reprise in The Croods: A New Age in two weeks. Presuming the release dates don’t change, she’ll star in Walt Disney’s DIS Cruella this Memorial Day weekend. That’s not nothing, but in that same span of time (2010 to 2020), Ryan Gosling has had 13 outright star vehicles, films big (First Man and Blade Runner 2049) and small (Drive, The Ides of March). Andrew Garfield went from Peter Parker to starring in films like Martin Scorsese’s Silence, Mel Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge, Ramin Bahrani’s (terrific and underseen) 99 Homes. Bradley Cooper starred in American Sniper and directed himself in A Star Is Born. Colin Firth has a big-budget action franchise (The Kingsman) to his name while Phoenix won an Oscar for Joker.

None of this is terribly surprising. Most movies, be they at the indie or studio level, are still made by and for white men. Moreover, the kind of mid-budget studio programmers that once would have starred Nicole Kidman, Sandra Bullock and Julia Roberts back in the 1990’s have all-but-vanished, leaving actresses mostly stuck with streaming, TV or being a “re-actress” in an actor’s character study. This is partially why Rachel McAdams never really broke out after The Wedding Crasher, Red Eye and The Family Stone. Anna Faris opened The House Bunny to $12 million in late 2008, with the $25 million comedy (costarring the likes of Emma Stone and Kat Dennings) legging out to $70 million. Her “reward” was playing Tom Cavanaugh’s love interest in Yogi Bear and Sacha Baron Cohen’s love interest in The Dictator.

None of this is to say that Emma Stone, an Oscar-winning actress allegedly worth $30 million, needs our pity. But if you’re wondering why Easy A feels as revolutionary in 2020 as it did in 2010, it’s partially because A) Hollywood mostly stopped making movies of its ilk, B) social mores have barely progressed, especially for girls, over the last decade and C) Stone going from scene-stealing support in Super Bad and Zombieland to face-on-the-poster movie star didn’t translate into more starring vehicles but rather a deluge of high(er) profile love interest/daughter roles. Meanwhile, Jonah Hill has two Oscar nominations and Jesse Eisenberg got to headline 16 star vehicles from 2011 to 2020 while finding time to play Lex Luthor. Meanwhile, Dennings and Faris had to go to network TV to reach their commercial potential.

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