A Cinderella Story
Hilary Duff waits tables at her wicked stepmother's San Fernando Valley diner while trading anonymous messages with a soulmate — who turns out to be Chad Michael Murray, the most popular boy in school. Critics hated it; an entire generation of sleepovers overruled them.
Released by Warner Bros. on July 16, 2004, and directed by Mark Rosman, A Cinderella Story relocated the fairy tale to the San Fernando Valley. Hilary Duff — then at the height of her Lizzie McGuire fame — played Sam Montgomery, an orphaned teen working at her stepmother's diner; Chad Michael Murray was Austin Ames, the school golden boy she'd been anonymously pouring her heart out to from behind a screen name. They finally meet, masked, at the school's Halloween dance, and the movie spends its back half on the question of whether Austin will figure out — and accept — who his mystery princess really is. Jennifer Coolidge steals scenes as Fiona, the botoxed stepmother, with Regina King as Rhonda, the diner waitress who plays fairy godmother.
Critics were merciless — an 11% Rotten Tomatoes score, with Roger Ebert dismissing it as "a lame, stupid movie" — but audiences graded it an A− on CinemaScore, and it turned a $19 million budget into $70.1 million worldwide. The verdict that stuck was the audience's: the film became a cable and sleepover perennial, spawned five direct-to-video follow-ups between 2008 and 2021, and settled into cult-classic status as one of the defining teen movies of the flip-phone era.
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