Booksmart

About

Booksmart is a 2019 American comedy film about two high school straight A students letting loose on their last day of class. The coming-of-age film was directed by Olivia Wilde and stars Beanie Feldstein and Kaitlyn Dever. Although the film did not do as well at the box office, the movie was well-reviewed.

History

On March 11th, 2019, Annapurna Pictures released the Official Restricted Trailer for Booksmart to YouTube (shown below). The video gained over 921,000 views and 4,800 likes in seven months. On May 24th, Booksmart was released to theaters.

Reception

The movie did not do as well in theaters as expected. On May 25th, 2019, Director Olivia Wilde took to Twitter^[6] to say, "Anyone out there saving @Booksmart for another day, consider making that day TODAY. We are getting creamed by the big dogs out there and need your support. Don’t give studios an excuse not to green-light movies made by and about women" (shown below). The tweet garnered over 90,500 likes and 17,000 retweets in five months.

That weekend many took to Twitter in praise of the movie and especially Billie Lourd's character.^[1] On May 26th, @Brook_LeVan tweeted, "Billie Lourd's entrance in #Booksmart is the most iconic scene I've ever had the blessing to witness" (shown below). The tweet accumulated over 2,300 likes and 670 retweets in five months.

The movie grossed just over $22,000,000 at the box office in all but has a 99% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.^[4][5] Many publications including W Magazine^[2] speculated as to why the movie was a flop in theaters. Twitter^[7] users @alexqsmith and @akstanwyck discussed Annapurna's method in introducing the movie as the culprit (shown below).

Delta Censoring Controversy

On October 26th, Twitter user @MichaelaBarton_ ^[10]wrote, "Tried watching Booksmart on the plane and they cut the ENTIRE lesbian hookup scene like not even a KISS was allowed! oh but don't worry guys, the Straights got their kiss" which gained over 3,600 likes and then continued on saying, "Update, watched a different film and they had completely unedited hetero sex scenes so pretty sure it's definitely a lesbian bias thing" (shown below, left). Olivia Wilde caught wind of the news and tweeted, "Censoring the word lesbian is just batshit insane what is going on 😳" (shown below, right).^[8][9] The tweet accumulated over 3,400 likes and 300 retweets in a day.

On October 29th, The Daily Dot^[3] obtained a Delta Airlines statement saying, "they work with third-party contractors to curate such content and then pick versions from those edits […] they don’t 'in any way ask for the removal of homosexual content from the film.'"

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External References