It wasn’t the most inventive teen movie to ever exist, but it did a competent job of keeping the key elements of the tale, yet updating it to suit the times.ĭespite the poor critical reception, the film made US$70 million on a budget of US$19 million, and inspired four other iterations of the tale (these were straight to VOD or streaming). Personally, I really love A Cinderella Story – the film has so many memorable scenes and quotable lines of dialogue. Rotten Tomatoes called it “an uninspired, generic updating of the classic fairy tale”, with a lackluster 12% score to its name. King does such a stellar job with the character, and there are little nods to Rhonda’s own backstory, which I found to be interesting since the fairy godmother is always just there to further Cinderella’s desires and isn’t really fleshed out in the earlier classic tale. Regina King, who plays Rhonda, is Sam’s mentor and fulfills the fairy godmother role in this adaptation. Instead of the stepmother being the most terrifying woman to walk the planet, Jennifer Coolidge turned her into a different type of villain, which set a new trend of the stepmother and stepsisters becoming the comic relief in future adaptations. The film attempted to add more layers to the romantic pairing, by making Sam and her love interest Austin Ames (Chad Michael Murray) pen pals. In the film, Duff plays Sam, who works as a janitor and dishwasher at her stepmother’s diner, a diner that used to belong to her father until he passed away. A Cinderella Storyĭuff, who became a household name after the Lizzie McGuire series, with her girl next door sunny disposition, already embodied the key traits of Cinderella herself. So, when it came to an adaption of Cinderella, there was no better person to play the lead role than Hilary Duff. Usually these films were helmed by a female lead that we were familiar with, which of course makes the films more marketable. These films were usually rom-coms, focused on female protagonists and the high school experience – sometimes engaging in relevant social commentary, like gender expectations in She’s the Man, or high school politics and social class in Clueless.
Then we arrived at the late 90s and early 2000s, where a trend of adapting older tales for the modern teen audience emerged, bringing us films like Clueless, 10 Things I Hate About You and She’s the Man.
When we think Cinderella, this is perhaps the first film that comes to mind, and because it is a Disney classic, it will always be one of the most popular adaptations of the story. This brings us to the 20th century and Disney’s animated tale being the first feature film to bring the story to the big screen. As time went by, certain versions of the story gained more popularity, with Charles Perrault’s version “Cendrillon ou la petite pantoufle de verre” in the 17th century bringing in certain elements we see embodied in modern day adaptations – namely the pumpkin, the fairy godmother and of course, the glass slippers.
The story of Cinderella has extensive historical roots, with the earliest variant of the story dating all the way back to 7 BC.