Nostalgia Is Freakier Friday's Secret Weapon, But Not In The Way You'd Think

Gen Z has been a hard problem for marketers to solve for almost half a decade now, as they mostly eschew traditional marketing mainstays like broadcast TV and movie theaters in favor of their favorite streamers and short-form video content. But when Zoomers really latch onto an idea, it can become powerful, just like it was for Millennials and Gen X before them. The most legible youth moment in pop culture right now is the Gen Z discovery of "Y2K" as an aesthetic, and brands all over are scrambling to capitalize on this tiny window of "cool." For "Freakier Friday," the choice to keep the film's style so close to "Freaky Friday" ends up being the movie's secret weapon, almost by accident!

Let's do some clarification here: The "Y2K Aesthetic" is defined by the CARI Institute as a fashion and design movement largely inspired by the 1990s and the decade's imagined future as influenced by the boundless optimism of the early Internet Age. Basically, pastel colors, silver clothing, blobby electronics and transparent technology by way of MTV music video blocks. It's tendrils have gripped the modern advertising space all around us, as our larger culture in the United States tries to speedrun the 2000s at breakneck pace. In essence, Zoomers are drawn to the idea of what the future could have been before it was written in the real world. So, an imagined 2000s stands in for some of the more realistic elements, but the advertising cues really feel on-the-money, and this is crucial for making "Freakier Friday" sing on-screen.

"Freakier Friday" doesn't try to subvert the original film in many ways, and instead, it largely plays the hits and refurbishes some of the rougher moments from the 2003 favorite. (Shout-out to actor Rosalind Chao and how director Nisha Gantara decided to do right by the central Chinese restaurant fortune cookie concept from "Freaky Friday" in the sequel!) One of the sneaky ways the movie accomplishes this is through the costume design for Julia Butters, Sophia Hammons, and all of their classmates at school.

Make no mistake, there's ironically an air of déjà vu that permeates "Freakier Friday" because of the repeated core concept of the movie. But that feeling of having been here before intensifies the second we see soon-to-be step-sisters Harper Coleman (Julia Butters) and Lily Davies (Sophia Hammons) at their school. One of the main plot points in "Freakier Friday" is that these two girls have a rivalry because Harper is a free-spirited surfer girl who wants to stay in LA and Lily is a buttoned-up popular kid who wants to be a fashion designer in London. Their beef is an inciting incident that brings their parents together and randomly achieves the body swap this franchise is known for. Harper switches places with Anna Coleman (Lindsay Lohan) and Lily takes a walk in Tess Coleman's (Jamie Lee Curtis) shoes.

It may be 2025, but what does that mean when a majority of the teenagers in the film are doing unintentional 2000s homages? It lends to the feeling of familiarity the aging Millennial audience is going to already bringing into those theaters doors on the way to the multiplex, since we're doing Aughts nostalgia here. That's beyond fortunate because once the movie settles in with the swap, "Freakier Friday" is really quite effervescent and fun, as both Lohan and Curtis get to let loose, with the actresses leaning all the way into these characters 20 years later. Shot composition calls back to "Freaky Friday," and Chad Michael Murray's beloved teen heartthrob Jake has aged into a "Silver Lake-model" cool dad-type. It all makes sense and will endear the entire audience to this film.

Nostalgia is a well-trodden technique in modern big-budget filmmaking, especially in the dreaded legacy sequel/follow-up category. But "Freakier Friday" succeeds by having an unabashed love for the decade that shaped this film. Too often, Hollywood has taken this sort of, "can you believe we used to like this nonsense?" kind of approach to legacy sequels, but recent trends indicate that nostalgia is the new black and savvy deployment of that imagery does numbers when used in the right context. Count "Freakier Friday" as a member of that group after the fan and media response to Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis' reunion tour, just take your Oakley goggles off while you're in the theater!