Cheaper by the Dozen

Cheaper by the Dozen opened on Christmas Day 2003, directed by Shawn Levy for 20th Century Fox. Technically it was a remake of the 1950 film drawn from the Gilbreth family's 1948 memoir, but beyond a passing mention of the Gilbreth name it kept little more than the title and the headcount. Steve Martin plays Tom Baker, a small-town college football coach with twelve children, who uproots the family to Evanston, Illinois for his dream coaching job just as his wife Kate — Bonnie Hunt — lands a book deal and leaves on a publicity tour, abandoning Tom to solo-parent a house that functions like a natural disaster.

Half the fun in hindsight is the cast list. The oldest Baker kids were played by Piper Perabo, Smallville-era Tom Welling, and Hilary Duff at the peak of her Lizzie McGuire fame, with a young Alyson Stoner among the younger siblings — and Ashton Kutcher turns up as Nora's self-absorbed actor boyfriend Hank, whose pranking by the kids (raw meat in the underwear, dog attached to said underwear) is the movie's most-remembered set piece. Kutcher's performance helped earn him a Golden Raspberry nomination that year, shared across his three 2003 films.

Critics shrugged — the Rotten Tomatoes consensus knocked its humor — but families didn't care: the movie grossed about $190 million worldwide on a $40 million budget, spawned a 2005 sequel, and settled into years of constant cable rotation, the kind of movie you watched a dozen Sunday afternoons without ever choosing it once. A Disney+ remake followed in 2022, but the chaotic Baker-house energy of the original — Oprah segment collapsing mid-taping, a runaway kid found on an Amtrak train, Martin doing full pratfall dad-panic — is the version a generation remembers.