A Walk to Remember
The one sweater, the wish list, the telescope on the balcony. Mandy Moore's first starring role turned Nicholas Sparks's 1999 novel into the sleepover weeper of 2002, got torn apart by critics, earned an A from audiences and was still being called one of the most romantic films ever made years later.
Nicholas Sparks wrote the novel for his sister Danielle, who died of breast cancer in 2000; both the book and the film are dedicated to her. "In many ways, Jamie Sullivan was my younger sister," he said in a speech after her death, and the story came from her life: she met a man who wanted to marry her "even when he knew she was sick, even when he knew that she might not make it." The book was set in the 1950s. Sparks and the producers moved the film to the present day because they worried a period piece would not draw teenagers, and made Landon's pranks rougher to match. Adam Shankman directed, and Warner Bros. shot it in Wilmington, North Carolina in the spring of 2001, borrowing the school, the hospital and Landon's house from the sets of Dawson's Creek, which was filming in town at the same time.
Shankman found Shane West in a magazine and cast him as Landon Carter, the popular senior in Beaufort whose prank puts a classmate in the hospital and lands him in tutoring, janitorial duty and the school play. Jamie Sullivan is the reverend's daughter with one sweater and no makeup, who agrees to run lines with him on one condition: don't fall in love with her. Mandy Moore, then a teen pop singer, said she hyperventilated crying when she read the book. The beats everyone remembers follow: the play where she sings and he kisses her, the wish list he helps her tick off (a tattoo, standing in two places at once), the leukemia she has been hiding, the telescope he builds so she can see a comet, the wedding in her mother's church, and the line about love being like the wind, which you cannot see but can feel.
It opened on January 25, 2002, in third place behind Black Hawk Down and Snow Dogs, and finished with $47.5 million worldwide on an $11.8 million budget. The reviews were savage. Rotten Tomatoes has it at 30 percent, Entertainment Weekly retitled it "A Walk to Forget," Salon called it an Edsel of a star vehicle, and Time later put it on a list of the ten worst chick flicks. Audiences handed it an A CinemaScore, Roger Ebert found Moore and West "quietly convincing," Us Weekly later ranked it among the 30 most romantic movies ever, and it won at the Teen Choice Awards.
Moore has never apologized for it. "I know people say it may be cliché and it's a tearjerker or it's cheesy," she said, "but for me, it's the thing I'm most proud of." In 2022 she said she would love a new version with Olivia Rodrigo as Jamie; a remake was confirmed to be in development in March 2025.
Similar items
Mandy Moore
"Candy" arrived in 1999, when she was fifteen, in the same debut class as Britney, Christina, and Jessica Simpson. Critics sorted her into the softest lane of the four — and then she spent the early 2000s playing mean girls on screen, walked away from teen pop with an album of 70s and 80s covers, and quietly outlasted the category she'd been filed under.
The Notebook
Ryan Gosling, Rachel McAdams, and the rain-soaked kiss that calcified into a generation's romantic ideal. Critics split; audiences swooned; the 2000s got its definitive sleepover weeper.
Dawson's Creek
The WB teen drama where impossibly articulate teenagers agonized over love and life in the seaside town of Capeside — and where the Dawson-versus-Pacey fight for Joey became one of the defining "who will she choose" debates of the era. Set to Paula Cole's "I Don't Want to Wait."
A Little Princess
"All girls are princesses." Alfonso Cuarón's 1995 version of the Burnett classic moved Sara Crewe to a New York boarding school in wartime, lost money in theaters, and then sold two million tapes. The attic, the locket, Miss Minchin: a sleeper that became a childhood staple on video.