Bring It On would be released in theaters on August 25, 2000, the weekend before Labor Day. For the filmmakers, it was anything but a long weekend to look forward to. 

“I don’t remember alternate dates being presented, but I do remember in the year 2000 that late August was a dumping ground,” director Peyton Reed said. “That was where movies went to die. That was my perception of it, anyway.”

He wasn’t wrong. Late August? That’s not a tentpole weekend by any means.

“It was filler,” Tim O’Hair, the Universal executive on the movie, remembered. “It was released almost on Labor Day in the dregs of the summer. That’s almost a punishment!” Reed, faced with the inevitability of his feature directorial debut coming out in the absolute dog days of summer, when kids have been hanging out for so long they’re almost itching to go back to school, just for something different, a change of pace from the sweaty doldrums of summer, grasped at anything he could: Maybe it was a back-to-school movie, maybe kids would go see it in a burst of last-gasp enthusiasm before they packed up their backpacks with their uncreased notebooks and freshly sharpened pencils.

“When you’re in that position and they’re telling you when you’re going to be released and you just—you’re clinging to anything,” he said. The studio seemed excited about the movie, the test screenings were going well, but there weren’t any comps that could predict how audiences would react to a female-led sports movie, and what comparisons they could draw weren’t exactly box office blockbusters.

And on top of all that, Bring It On would open against The Art of War, the presumed number one draw of the weekend, starring Wesley Snipes. They were dead in the water before they’d even grabbed a suit, it seemed.

All that was left to do was to let the movie open and hope for the best.

“We were always an underdog of a movie . . . It’s a strange feeling, [and] you’ve just got to like, make peace,” Reed said. “You’ve got to know how you feel about your own movie before it goes out there and everybody judges it publicly. I felt like I liked the tone of the movie, and was proud of the movie, and I was braced for it to just get ripped apart, but I think that’s true of every movie I’ve ever made. . . . It was also my first time through that process of finishing something that you’ve been a control freak about, and then it’s out there, and you have no control over it. And that feeling can break your brain, it’s crazy. You have to just kind of go with your gut, like I know what I like about this movie and if I like it I know somebody else, at least two other people, will like it.”

The day finally arrived: August 25, 2000, just a few days after the movie’s red carpet premiere, Bring It On opened in theaters.

About that premiere: you’ve never seen so many spaghetti straps, and Blaque’s Natina Reed attended the event in a full red-and-black leather take on an angel ensemble, complete with wings. Hired cheerleading squads stunted in front of the big screen in Westwood in an event presented by ’90s standby brands Candie’s Shoes and Teen People magazine. Rufus King, the band that recorded Cliff’s song, “Just What I Need,” was in attendance, with the band Sugarcult as their guests. Actors Ben Savage and Taye Diggs were there, with the former wearing a souvenir ringer T-shirt from the Crazy Horse Saloon in Miami. Multiple cast members wore handkerchief-style formal crop tops. The carpet: red. The heels: kitten. The choker necklaces: plentiful. It was the first red carpet for many of the cast, and the first time many of them had seen the movie at all, and they didn’t know what to expect from the end result of that wild summer, now a year past.

“I didn’t really know what to wear,” Clare Kramer said of the premiere. “So if I had to do that over, I would definitely change what I wore. But I remember being like, this is a really good movie, this is fun.”

“When we went to the premiere, did we know it was gonna be big? I don’t think anybody knew what it was gonna be,” Huntley Ritter said.

While Reed had been working with the team on getting the final touches done for the edit, marketing, and release, the cast and crew had moved on to other projects. Camp was over, but the video year- book was finally ready for them—and the world—to see.

“I kind of like left it and it was kind of out of sight, out of mind,” Kramer said. “And then I remember a couple months later my man- ager called me and he was like, ‘OK, I just saw a screening of Bring It On and it’s a really good movie!’ And I was like, really? He’s like, ‘Yeah, it’s like, really good.’”

Screenwriter Jessica Bendinger had seen a near-final cut of the movie on a VHS tape in a hotel room in upstate New York, where she was working on another movie. With a click track standing in for the movie’s music, the elaborate cheer routines performed in surreal near-silence. The story that had lived in her brain for over a half-decade by that point was there on the screen in front of her. It kind of freaked her out, to say the least. It didn’t feel bad to see it, but it didn’t feel great, either. “It’s very disorienting,” she said. Later, going into her first big-screen showing of the final cut, a friends and family affair arranged by Universal just ahead of the premiere, she felt “pretty panicked, insecure, and anxious.”

She was flanked at that screening by friends and fellow filmmak- ers Dan and Mark Waters. After encouraging her for so long and see- ing the genesis of Cheer Fever, they had a different relationship to the movie than anyone else in the audience. They wanted it to succeed, and badly. Seeing their petrified friend, they were as nervous for her as they might be before the opening moments of one of their own movies.

“It’s so nerve-racking before you go in and then it’s just like, instantly, fifty-pound weights get lifted from your shoulders, and you’re like, oh my god, they got it,” Dan Waters remembered. “It’s working, oh my god, they didn’t try to change it, they went with the whole Jessica-ness of it, and it’s working on every level. From the opening moments, like, oh my god, I’m in heaven. This is great.” 

Bendinger didn’t feel quite that same elation.

“Did they tell you how I was devastated after the [Universal] screening?” she said. “I just was so upset. Danny was like, ‘This is gonna be a huge hit, you’re totally crazy.’”

On opening night, a few of the production’s key players gathered at Reed’s place in Laurel Canyon, where a van rented by Universal waited to take the crew around to a few theaters in town, something of a time-honored opening-night tradition. Pop in, stand in the back for a few minutes, hope you hear some nice audience reactions, move on.

The vibe at the gathering was friendly and excited, celebratory but not jubilant.

“I remember the night started off like, it’s good that we’re together,” Reed said. “We’re gonna get good news or we’re gonna get bad news, and it’s good that we’re together. Let’s celebrate the fact that we made and finished this movie and it’s opening in theaters, and we know what we like about the movie and anything else is gravy.”

O’Hair, the sole Universal exec in attendance, said, “I was told in advance, keep the budget down, don’t spend any money. We had our dinner at Buca di Beppo up at Universal CityWalk. Not exactly a fancy movie dinner.” Buca di Beppo is a cheesy-on-purpose (pun intended) red-sauce chain that serves family-style meals and calls out per-person prices on the shared dishes on the menu. There’s one in Times Square. I have a feeling that it wasn’t a coincidence that this Universal-footed meal was taking place on Universal-owned property.

The group’s first stop on the van tour was a theater in Century City.

“My biggest memory is that, OK, there were people in the theater, which is not a given,” Reed said. “I had two feelings walking into that first theater. I was thrilled there were people in the theater who seemed to be engaged with the movie and laughing. And I also remember, you know, after you’ve gone to all this trouble of color correcting the movie and stuff, I remember that on the opening night, the print already seemed a little scratchy and was kind of like weaving a little bit.” Ever the director.

O’Hair remembered that the first theater or two, they weren’t full. There were people, but there were seats open. “The mood in that van was kind of like tepid, like what’s going on,” he said.

But then they drove farther south, and one of their stops was the Magic Johnson Crenshaw 15, a multiplex in the Baldwin Hills Mall. Baldwin Hills has a predominantly Black population, including many musicians and actors who call the area home. And the Magic Johnson theaters—besides that one, there was one in a Maryland suburb of DC; more in Cleveland, Dallas, and Atlanta; and one that’s still open in New York City’s Harlem—were an eponymous project to bring multiplexes to predominantly Black communities. And that theater was packed. O’Hair recalled being told that the movie had been sold out all day there.

“I remember going in where there was a predominantly Black audience and experiencing that audience and that audience’s reaction and being so excited that it was playing to both audiences,” Reed said. The next theater they visited was also packed.

All around town and across the country, the same thing was happening: the kids were lining up. The seats were filling.

Nathan West called the scene at the theater he went to on opening night in Orange, California, thirty-some miles from L.A., “absolute madness.” He grabbed his family and girlfriend and some friends and bought tickets, “not knowing how it’s going to do or anything.”

“We went and watched an earlier screening, and then we came out, and the lineup was, I mean it was like, so crowded,” he said. “All these cheerleaders in their outfits and stuff, some of them going back to watch the second time. So I was walking out, and I saw these cheerleaders and I just said, you know what, I’m just gonna go over and say hi. Half of them had already seen it, so they freaked out, of course, and then they all wanted pictures and I was trying to leave and then they chased me out to the car and surrounded my car. I took a picture with every single one of them. It was madness.”

“Here we were, like, hoping to have a $3, $4, or $5 million weekend and then we had this like crazy hit opening weekend,” Dushku said.

“The studio had very moderate expectation, at best,” Beacon’s Abraham told me. One industry friend had run comps and tracked it to make about $6 million for the weekend, he said, not great for a movie that cost over $11 million. It was a low financial risk as far as movie budgets go, sure, but you always hope for a movie to earn back its budget. “I didn’t feel the best about six for the weekend, but I’ve had many times of disappointment, so you kind of get toughened to it,” he said. “I think we were hoping to get like, nine. . . . I was a little bit, you know, hoping, but I didn’t expect anything major to happen.”

Abraham had a friend in marketing and distribution at another studio who would get the first numbers straight from the West Coast theaters on Friday night, from which he could extrapolate the weekend’s numbers.

“He sent these faxes around every Friday night, they’d come around twelve, one o’clock, and they would have gotten the key numbers out of the theaters,” Abraham said. “This was all, you know, sub- rosa. There was no Internet, there was no box office, people didn’t know what was happening.” So Abraham, at home in L.A., gets this tracking fax, those first numbers. He picks up the phone.

At dinner at Buca de Beppo, O”Hair remembered, “a call comes in. I think the studio calls Marc Abraham and then Marc called Max or Peyton. And they say, ‘You made X million dollars.’ And you go, ‘X million!’ Like $6 million, or whatever. That’s great, right? Next word comes out: ‘tonight.’ And people started crying. It was a great deal of pent-up emotion at that moment.”

The movie had blown past its expected earnings for the whole week in one night, and would top the box office.

“Kirsten heard from her agent and then she started crying and saying, ‘I have the number one movie,’” Reed said. “It was just adorable. It was great. Her mom was with us.”

“We were this little movie in San Diego,” Dunst said. “I mean, we were a Universal movie, but it was such a low budget and I did not think—this was the first movie that I was the lead of that was number one at a box office, you know what I mean? A huge deal.”

Dunst wasn’t the only emotional one. Reed had not only carried his feature directorial debut across the finish line, made an entire movie, but that movie was now succeeding. People wanted to see it.

“I knew I wanted to be a director since I was twelve and started shooting with a Super Eight camera,” Reed said. “I worked as a driver, I worked as an assistant props person, I worked in set dressing and all these different positions, location manager on low-budget movies and things, and all the while I was sort of writing and editing and trying to get my own movie made. So yeah, it was really, really rewarding. It was very, very exciting.”

“We kind of blew the doors off for that kind of movie,” Abraham said. “Late August, not the time you open movies. Basically a ‘girl movie,’ and about cheerleading—it just came out of nowhere. It defied tracking, it defied the genre, it defied everything. We were euphoric about it. We couldn’t believe, I couldn’t believe it. I was getting all these phone calls from everybody going, ‘What the fuck? How did you? What?’ Like I was a genius or something. But I had no clue. If I knew it was gonna make $17 million [in the opening weekend], I would have probably tried to make a better deal.”

“All these years later, I have such a warm feeling,” Reed said. “I remember being thrilled, but in disbelief. It’s a really deeply emotional experience. I’m sure I got a little misty-eyed. I can get emotional about that stuff. I’m pretty even keeled about most things, but you know, you do look back and realize how much hard work and intensity go into something like that and it’s like, OK, yeah, I can—I need to allow myself to enjoy this. Because if you can’t enjoy that, what can you enjoy? It was a thrill.” 

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