Jennifer's Body

The midnight screening already felt like a funeral.

Toronto, September 10, 2009. Fox Atomic's Megan Fox horror comedy played TIFF Midnight Madness, and Diablo Cody later told Variety she felt the room go wrong in real time. Nobody got it. A sickening feeling, she said, and not the fun kind . Eight days later Jennifer's Body opened wide in the United States. It did $6.8 million its first weekend, fifth behind Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, and finished at $31.6 million worldwide on a $16 million budget , . The trades called that a flop. latestnetflix.com's read is that the poster had already advertised a different movie than the one Karyn Kusama shot.

Cody has said she wrote it for girls. Kusama kept reminding the studio they could not sell it to boys, then watch those boys find Fox ripping intestines instead of taking her clothes off . Fox Atomic still leaned on the Transformers sex-bomb image. Cody recalled a marketing reply that read, "Jennifer sexy, she steal your boyfriend," as if a caveman had written it . The team killed a planned stunt that would have put Fox on an amateur porn site . During production they had to fight to keep a single kiss between Fox and Amanda Seyfried . At the ten-year mark Cody said the studio's answer, when she asked to aim the campaign at women, was a "fuck you" . Fox put it simpler in that same Variety package. A lot of the marketing hinged on "Megan Fox is sexy, come see this movie." The movie was not about that .

Adam Brody played Nikolai Wolf, the satanic indie frontman whose band botches a virgin sacrifice. In 2023 he still sounded furious. Directed by a woman, starring two women, written by that year's screenwriting Oscar winner, and they buried all of that for people who liked Transformers . The official trailer did the poster's job . Opening-night crowds were 51 percent female and 70 percent under 25, closer to Cody's target than Fox Atomic's . Critics still treated it as a lurid boy toy. Roger Ebert was kinder than most and still opened by calling it a Twilight for boys . Fox Atomic itself was already dying as a label. Big Fox dumped a gory romp into an early-fall slot instead of handing it to Searchlight, the shop that had walked Juno to awards .

By 2019 the same Variety oral history that printed the studio fight was calling the film a cult object . Cody later said audiences could catch the queer current without her dropping an anvil . In October 2025 Kusama told Deadline that Cody was already on a sequel script. Fun and crazy like the first film, she said. She would not spoil the bones . Cody has said she is not done with Jennifer's Body. She wants a backer who believes in it and can pay for it . Netflix is one of the places the 2009 cut still plays. The story that stuck is cheaper than a set feud. A studio sold the wrong appetite, then spent a decade watching girls find the movie anyway.