The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
Four best friends, one pair of jeans that inexplicably fits all of them, and their first summer apart. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants was only a modest hit in theaters in 2005, but plenty of people who were the right age remember it as a sleepover staple — the movie you watched with your own group of friends while quietly deciding which of the four you were.
The film is based on Ann Brashares's 2001 novel, adapted by screenwriters Delia Ephron and Elizabeth Chandler and directed by Ken Kwapis for Warner Bros. The setup is simple. Lena, Tibby, Carmen and Bridget are lifelong best friends from Bethesda, Maryland, about to spend their first summer apart. While shopping together they find a pair of jeans that fits each of them perfectly despite their very different figures, and they agree to share the pants equally over the summer, passing them from one girl to the next.
Then the movie splits four ways. Lena (Alexis Bledel) visits her grandparents on the Greek island of Santorini; Bridget (Blake Lively) goes to soccer camp in Baja California; Carmen (America Ferrera) visits her father in South Carolina; and Tibby (Amber Tamblyn) stays home, working at a department store and making a film. Shooting began in May 2004 on Santorini itself before moving to Mexico. Bledel was already familiar from Gilmore Girls; Lively would go on to Gossip Girl.
It opened in June 2005 at number five with about $9.8 million, and finished at roughly $42 million worldwide on a $25 million budget — fine, not huge. Its longer life came afterward, at home: this is a movie remembered less from the theater than from the sleepover. A sequel, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2, followed in August 2008.
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