There's an argument to be made that 1999's teen nerd-to-beauty comedy She's All That really didn't need an update. And yet here we are, as Netflix premieres the trailer for He's All That.
Mean Girls director Mark Waters is behind the camera here for a film that finds Addison Rae as Paget Sawyer, a popular teen influencer who discovers that her musician boyfriend – who she turned from a nobody into a somebody – is cheating on her. Distraught, she accepts a challenge to do it all over again, targeting her school's biggest loser as a candidate for transformation into prom king.
Of course, when said loser is Tanner Buchanan (AKA Cobra Kai's Robby Keane), you know he's essentially going to be a handsome hunk buried under baggy clothes and stringy long hair. But then, the idea of the attractive Rachel Leigh Cook as a nerd in the original who simply takes off her glasses and suddenly looks beautiful to everyone is baked into the silliness of the original. And Cook crops up here as Paget's mother, with a further connection to the original in Matthew Lillard, who can briefly be seen in the trailer bopping in the prom scene.
Can the basic concept work today with this reversal? We'll find out when the film drops on Netflix on 27 August.