Fox Searchlight’s legal department spent early 2008 firing cease-and-desist letters at blogs running unauthorized reviews of Diablo Cody’s then-unfilmed Jennifer’s Body script. The strategy worked at suppressing pre-release commentary. It didn’t help the movie when it actually came out. And the part neither side could have predicted is that the film would, a decade later, become a defining cult classic of the era.
Then
In February 2008, with Juno still riding its awards-season wave and Diablo Cody’s profile at its highest point, Fox Searchlight was preparing the Jennifer’s Body production. Pre-release script coverage on blogs was running ahead of the studio. The fan-and-genre site CC2K, in a write-up by a contributor going by Big Ross, had reviewed the Jennifer’s Body script and gotten hit with a cease-and-desist letter, and CC2K’s readership at minimum, and probably a wider blog audience, knew it.
The original FishbowlLA framing — under the “So Sue Me” category — quoted a Hollywood-Elsewhere post arguing that the C&D pattern signaled a publicity machine working overtime to protect “this processed fairytale” from any pre-release dent. The piece also noted that casting for the film was underway, and that the production was eyeing two openly-emo musicians — Pete Wentz of Fall Out Boy and Joel Madden of Good Charlotte — for the role of Nikolai, leader of the Satanic-emo band in the film. (Adam Brody was eventually cast as the band’s frontman, a role that became one of the movie’s most memorable.)
The C&D strategy worked at suppressing the underlying script discussion. It also, in the way pre-release controversies often do, didn’t help the film position itself for release.
Now
Jennifer’s Body opened in September 2009 and was widely written off — by critics, by the box office, and by the publicity strategy that had spent the prior eighteen months trying to position Megan Fox as a sex symbol rather than a horror lead. The movie made about $31 million worldwide against a $16 million budget, which was a disappointment relative to expectations, and Diablo Cody’s post-Juno career took a meaningful hit on the back of the reception.
What happened next is one of the more documented critical-reappraisal arcs in recent film culture. Beginning around 2018 and accelerating sharply through 2019 — the film’s tenth anniversary — Jennifer’s Body was reclaimed as a generationally important feminist horror text. Critics and academics revisited the framing that had marketed Megan Fox to a straight-male audience for a movie that was actually structured around female friendship, queer subtext, and the consumption of toxic masculinity. Megan Fox herself reframed her relationship to the film in subsequent interviews. Diablo Cody spoke about the reappraisal as vindicating. The film now regularly appears on cult-classic-of-the-era lists and is taught in horror-studies and screenwriting courses.
The cease-and-desist letters that worried Kate Coe in February 2008 are, in retrospect, a footnote to a much more interesting story about how studio publicity, audience reception, and critical consensus can take fifteen years to land in the same place. Fox Searchlight as an imprint was absorbed into Searchlight Pictures under Disney’s 2019 acquisition of 20th Century Fox; the studio that was sending the lawyers no longer exists in the form it did then.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine: September 2009 snapshot