Harriet the Spy

Harriet the Spy was the first film released under the Nickelodeon Movies banner, which had been founded in February 1995, and it reached theaters through Paramount on July 10, 1996, with the Hey Arnold! pilot "Arnold" screening ahead of it. The source was Louise Fitzhugh's 1964 novel about a sixth-grader who wants to be a writer and practices by spying on her neighbors and classmates, recording everything in a notebook. Director Bronwen Hughes, making her feature debut, said the 1960s formality between parents and kids had to be loosened for a 1990s audience but that everything that hurt Harriet in the book had to hurt her on screen too. She aimed for a "timeless" film with as little technology in it as possible.

Michelle Trachtenberg, then known from Nickelodeon's The Adventures of Pete & Pete, made her major film debut as Harriet M. Welsch. She remembered the shoot beginning on October 11, 1994, her ninth birthday, and said she related to the character's curiosity and love of writing. Vanessa Lee Chester, who played her friend Janie, had filmed a commercial with her when the two were five. Rosie O'Donnell was Ole Golly, the nanny Harriet confides in, and Eartha Kitt played the eccentric Agatha K. Plummer. Filming ran in Toronto from that fall into the winter of 1995, with the city dressed as New York, which Hughes admitted nothing really resembles.

Reviews were mixed. Roger Ebert praised Trachtenberg while calling it "not a very technically accomplished movie," and John Anderson of the Los Angeles Times noted that it was not afraid to expose "the offhanded cruelty of one girl's ego": this was "not a happy little movie about the sweetness of childhood." Audiences gave it a B+ CinemaScore. It opened to $6.6 million on 1,826 screens and finished around $26.6 million worldwide against a $12 million budget, a modest success. Nickelodeon Movies followed it with Good Burger the next summer.

The VHS came out in February 1997 in the orange clamshell, packaged with two Rugrats music videos. Trachtenberg went on to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Gossip Girl; she died in February 2025 at 39.