Knocked Up

Knocked Up landed June 1, 2007, written and directed by Judd Apatow — his follow-up to The 40-Year-Old Virgin, which had proven that messy, R-rated comedies with a heart could find massive audiences. Seth Rogen played Ben Stone, an aimless pot-smoking slacker who has a one-night stand with Alison Scott (Katherine Heigl), an ambitious young woman on her way up in television. She gets pregnant; the rest is the movie. Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann supplied the married-couple B-plot as Pete and Debbie — a funny, uncomfortably honest preview of what Ben and Alison might become.

The $25 million production returned $148.8 million domestically — big enough to feel like a genuine phenomenon — and critics largely came aboard (90% on Rotten Tomatoes), because the film balanced raunch with real stakes about growing up. Rogen's leap from sidekick to leading man felt like a moment, and paired with Superbad's arrival that August, the summer of 2007 crowned Apatow as the defining comedy brand of the decade — improvised-feeling, foul-mouthed, secretly sweet.

The famous aftermath beat: Heigl later called the film "a little sexist" in a Vanity Fair interview, saying it "paints the women as shrews" — a candid critique that has followed the movie's legacy ever since. The film itself remains a time capsule of the exact moment the Apatow style took over studio comedy.