Tied to the 20th anniversary of Bring It On, we hereby dub this Teen Movie Week. Dig up your varsity jacket, pull up to your cafeteria table, and re-live your adolescence as we celebrate the best coming-of-age movies ever made.
It might sound super corny, but in a Final Four that included Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Scream, Superbad, and Mean Girls, there could be no losers. All of those movies are classics, showcasing the heights and range of the teen genre. They’re each undoubtedly in the Teen Movie Pantheon, regardless of what some online polls said. Speaking of online polls, though: they overwhelmingly preferred two of the movies over the other ones.
John Hughes’s Ferris Bueller’s Day Off defeated Wes Craven’s metahorror teen classic Scream with ease, racking up 78 percent of all votes—a pretty dominant win considering Scream was also a 1-seed. And on the other side of the bracket, Superbad won the competition of best teen movie from the 2000s by taking down Mean Girls. That one was a little closer: Mean Girls pulled in 44 percent on the website, though it was also beaten pretty handily on Twitter (68-32 percent) and Instagram (63-37 percent). In the end, it was McLovin over Mathletes; Kyle’s Killer Lemonade over Kalteen Bars.
And now only two remain: After a week of competition, The Ringer’s Teen Movie Bracket has come down to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off versus Superbad.
Again, you can’t really go wrong picking either of these movies. Both are sublime one-day-in-the-life teen movies that tackle the fleeting freedoms of adolescence, the looming burdens of adulthood, and the pricelessness of friendship. Both feature iconic teen performances (and iconic musical performances!); both feature great running scenes; both feature a character pretending to be way older than he actually is.
It’s really a matter of preference: ’80s versus aughts; playing hooky versus partying; getting chased by the principal versus getting chased by the cops; dancing to “Twist and Shout” versus dancing to “Big Poppa” (the former is certainly, uh, much more hygienic).
Take a beat, think about it, and then cast your vote.
You can vote here, on Twitter, and on Instagram until midnight tonight. Come back Saturday morning to find out who will be crowned the best teen movie.
