Romy and Michele's High School Reunion

Romy and Michele started on stage. Robin Schiff wrote them into her 1988 play Ladies Room, where her fellow Groundling Lisa Kudrow played Michele opposite Christie Mellor's Romy; Schiff had modeled the pair, visually, on two friends she kept seeing outside a club on Sunset Boulevard who always looked as if they had dressed together in different versions of the same outfit. The play became an unsold sitcom pilot, Just Temporary, and then Touchstone, which was looking for a female version of Wayne's World, found it. Schiff hesitated until she imagined the two of them filling out a reunion questionnaire and realizing their lives had amounted to nothing, and she spent the next five years on the script.

Kudrow's rising fame on Friends got the film through development. Toni Collette was a strong contender for Romy, but the studio offered it to Mira Sorvino just as she was about to win her Oscar for Mighty Aphrodite; director David Mirkin had conceived the pair as one tall and one short and decided he loved the idea of "this idiot blonde power couple" instead. They shot in Los Angeles from April to June 1996, with Valencia High School standing in for Sagebrush High, Clueless costumer Mona May dressing the leads, and $240,000 of the $20 million budget going to license Cyndi Lauper's "Time After Time." Touchstone found Mirkin's cut too quirky and wanted it sweetened; he held his ground.

The film opened on April 25, 1997, at number two behind Volcano, in the same month as Grosse Pointe Blank, another '80s-flavored reunion comedy with Disney money in it, and finished with about $29 million in North America. Critics were split and CinemaScore audiences graded it a C, but Ebert gave it three stars as "one of the brightest and goofiest comedies in a while," and Janet Maslin praised Kudrow and Sorvino for "elevating bubble-headedness to new levels of comic ingenuity." The three-way dance with Sandy Frink earned an MTV Movie Award nomination for Best Dance Sequence.

Then it did what cult comedies do: VHS in November 1997, years of cable reruns, and a following that outgrew the box office. ABC Family aired a prequel in 2005 with Katherine Heigl and Alexandra Breckenridge, a stage musical premiered in Seattle in 2017 and was announced for an off-Broadway run in 2025, Kudrow and Sorvino presented at the 2022 SAG Awards in character, and a sequel for Hulu, with Schiff writing and Alan Cumming back as Sandy, is in the works for 2027.