The Barden Bellas take on the world in Pitch Perfect 2
As Pitch Perfect 2 takes the US box officeby storm, Amy Kaufman examines a rare word-of-mouth hit
"I'm gonna really embarrass myself here," Howard Stern cautioned his satellite radio listeners. "But I watched Pitch Perfect, and I liked it." That 2012 comedy about a female a cappella group beloved by teenage girls? It was the shock jock's guilty pleasure.
Universal Pictures executives passed around audio from Stern's show, taken aback by the film's unlikely fan. But his surprising confession was just one of many unlikely developments that led to the studio greenlighting a highly anticipated sequel to what was only a modest box office success.
It's the kind of story that happens rarely in Hollywood these days - the true word-of-mouth hit. The young females came first: opening weekend, the audience was 81 per cent female, with 55 per cent under age 25.
The demographic fully embraced the picture's girl power-centric storyline and the soundtrack's creative spin on Top 40 hits. High schoolers began hosting sing-along slumber parties. Children were driving their parents batty trying to master Cups, the film's most popular song with a rhythmic portion that requires hand-clapping and a paper cup.
In case you weren't one of those fangirls, a quick primer: Pitch Perfect follows the Barden Bellas, an a cappella group whose members bond as they try to pull their act together for a national singing competition. There's the artsy girl who works at the school's radio station and remixes the group's songs (Anna Kendrick). The plump goofball who insists her group mates call her "Fat Amy" even though her name is Patricia (Rebel Wilson). The neurotic overachiever so obsessed with a cappella that she uses "aca" as an all-purpose prefix, as in, "aca-awesome!" (Brittany Snow). They're a ragtag group of underdogs, but together they make it work.