Juno
Elliot Page's whip-smart pregnant teenager, Diablo Cody's Oscar-winning screenplay, a hamburger phone, and a Moldy Peaches soundtrack: Juno was the indie monoculture moment of 2007. Made for about $7 million, it earned $232 million and four Oscar nominations — and for a solid year, everyone you knew talked a little more like Juno MacGuff.
Diablo Cody's screenplay brought a witty, unglamorous take on teenage pregnancy that felt genuinely new. Jason Reitman directed the roughly $7 million production for Fox Searchlight, premiering it at Telluride on September 1, 2007, ahead of a December theatrical release. Elliot Page stars as Juno, a sharp-talking teenager navigating an unplanned pregnancy and an adoption plan, with Michael Cera as boyfriend Paulie Bleeker and Jennifer Garner, Jason Bateman, Allison Janney, and J.K. Simmons around them.
The numbers stunned everyone: $232 million worldwide. The Academy handed it four nominations — Best Picture, Best Director for Reitman, Best Actress for Page (then 20), and Best Original Screenplay, which Cody won. The soundtrack, built around Kimya Dawson in her various guises, was its own phenomenon: it hit #1 on the Billboard 200 in its fourth week, the first soundtrack to top that chart since Dreamgirls, and the film closes on the Moldy Peaches' duet "Anyone Else but You" — a warm, off-key goodbye that crystallizes the whole movie.
Through late 2007 and 2008, Juno was simply everywhere — quotable, twee, inescapable. Fox Searchlight mailed hamburger phones to journalists and critics as promotion (Cody had really used an identical one in high school), a stunt that captured the film's exact blend of heart and absurdism. It became the template for what a tiny indie comedy could do to the culture.
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